Current is&t Issue

Volume 20

No. 4  March/April 2005

Email Users: Make the Move from POP to IMAP

• Jon Hunt

Information Services and Technology (IS&T) has been recommending Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) for accessing email for several years and is now promoting IMAP as MIT’s primary mail protocol. IMAP provides flexibility and functionality that the Post Office Protocol (POP) does not. All of MIT’s recommended email applications (clients) support IMAP and some, such as Outlook, only support IMAP.

IMAP resolves problems that can occur with email clients that use POP. One of the most common problems is receiving duplicate messages: this can happen because POP was never designed to handle email retrieval from multiple machines. A kludge enables this functionality in POP, but it does not always work, and users can end up with multiple copies of the same message. With IMAP, email is stored on the central servers, and you can securely and reliably access your email from multiple machines.

IMAP also has several useful features that POP does not provide:

• You can access your email from any web browser using WebMail.

• You get 250MB of space on enterprise email servers.

• You can optimize your email client to handle large volumes of email over slow connections by downloading just the headers and then selecting messages to read. This is very useful for PDA email clients.

• You can access email from multiple machines with ease and maintain the messages status (such as read or unread) between them.

• You can easily configure and check MIT’s Spamscreen, since it shows up as a folder within your IMAP inbox.

Recommended Clients
IS&T supports the following IMAP email clients:

For Windows
– Outlook 2003
– Eudora 6.2.1

For Mac OS X
– Apple Mail
– Eudora 6.1 or later

For Linux and Athena
– Evolution 1.4.5

For Palm-based PDA devices
– SnapperMail Enterprise 2.1.1
– VersaMail 2.7 and greater

To facilitate the migration from POP to IMAP, IS&T launched email client release efforts for Eudora 6.2.1 and Apple Mail. The Eudora 6.2.1 installer will migrate current Eudora POP users to IMAP unless they opt out during the installation. IS&T has also worked to ensure that the installer functions for Group Policy deployment in win.mit.edu.

To find out more about any of the recommended email clients, go to the IS&T web site and type the name of the software in the search box.

Security Vulnerability in Eudora for Windows
Note that the Windows versions of Eudora 5.2 and earlier have a vulnerability that, if exploited, would enable an attacker to execute arbitrary code remotely on a machine. In order to be secure, Windows users running Eudora 5.2 (or earlier versions) should either upgrade to Eudora 6.2.1 or migrate to another IMAP email client such as Outlook 2003. The details of this vulnerability will be made public on May 2, 2005 and an exploit is more likely once the details are published.

Support
IS&T is providing documentation (including Getting Started with IMAP and the Guide to IMAP at MIT) and support to help users migrate from Eudora to Apple Mail or Outlook. You will also find some useful tips in the Tech Tips column in this issue.

If you have questions about migrating to IMAP, contact the Computing Help Desk at 253-1101 or <computing-help@mit.edu>.

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