The IMAP Protocol

The POP3 protocol was designed to handle the case of a user who spends most of his or her time working on a single machine. The mail client's job is to fetch the user's unread mail from time to time from the remote mailbox server. The user then reads the mail and possibly sorts it into several local mail folders.

Keeping track of mail becomes more complicated, however, when the user is moving around a lot: working on a desktop in the office, a laptop while traveling, and another desktop at home. In this case, the user wants to see the same set of mail files no matter where he or she happens to be working. The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) satisfies these needs by managing multiple remote mail folders and transparently ...

Get Network Programming with Perl now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.