IMAP Fear

[CartoonChess]

Hello everyone,

Recently I moved on from POP3 and onto IMAP, and as an iMac-iBook user, it has made life a lot easier. I do have one fear, though, and that is of losing my mail.

Currently I have Mail.app set up to keep all messages on the server as well as keep local copies of them. However, what if the mail server pushes up daisies? Will Mail talk to the server and assume all the messages were deleted legitimately, and in turn clear out its local copies?

Thank you for dealing with the paranoia.

 

[mkrishnan]

Who are you using for mail service? Assuming this isn't your BFF who set up mail on his old computer in the basement, the likelihood is that their system is a lot tighter than yours.

Anyway, though, I guess, if the IMAP server deleted all your mails for some reason, and was still WORKING, then yes, when you logged in, Mail would update the local mailbox to match the empty server mailbox. But this would not happen if the IMAP server went down. Only if it was running but the mails had been deleted.

If the server is *down*, then what happens is that Mail fails to connect, takes the mailbox offline, and lets you see offline copies of the mails in it.

So, it's not really a concern.

 

[CartoonChess]

Assuming this isn't your BFF who set up mail on his old computer in the basement, the likelihood is that their system is a lot tighter than yours.

Heheheh. It's a big-name host and everything, really, and although I'm aware (as you pointed out) that the server simply being down won't cause such problems, it's a big what-if fear. Maybe I'll take my chances and, say, zip the whole thing once every few months. Just to be safe. In case they delete all my mail. By accident.

Thanks for the help!

 

[mkrishnan]

I do hear what you're saying... I've used IMAP for some time now, and it seems generally reliable. If you are really concerned, you could certainly set up a rule or something so that you copy all of the mail into an offline folder on one of the computers. That way you have a backup.

I personally don't use the IMAP inbox for long-term storage. After e-mail's been "taken care of," it goes into offline folders on my iMac. Also I never delete e-mail except for junk mail.