Chapter 15. IMAP
At first glance, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) resembles the POP protocol described in Chapter 14. And if you have read the first sections of Chapter 13, which give the whole picture of how e-mail travels across the Internet, you will already know that the two protocols fill a quite similar role: POP and IMAP are two ways that a laptop or desktop computer can connect to a larger Internet server to view and manipulate a user's e-mail.
But there the resemblance ends. Whereas the capabilities of POP are rather anemic—the user can download new messages to his or her personal computer—the IMAP protocol offers such a full array of capabilities that many users store their e-mail permanently on the server, keeping it safe ...
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