One of the earliest features folks embraced when they discovered the Internet was obviously email. As with the rest of the online world, it wasn’t originally designed to accommodate the needs of hundreds of millions of users, and so there were problems. Number one with a bullet is spam, and I won’t even attempt to deal with that mess. Clearly the engineers who continue to work on the technology need to devise something that makes your email more secure and gives you more freedom from endless annoyances, and that also includes malware, although it’s mostly an issue on the Windows side of the planet. At least for now that is.
However, the most troubling issue remains unsolved, and that’s how to make email accounts easier to set up on your Mac or PC. You have two major systems, known as POP and IMAP.
POP, short for Post Office Protocol, the one used by most ISPs and such free services as Yahoo! and Gmail, downloads your email direct to your computer. From there, you’re on your own. If you lose it, and have no backup, that’s too bad. There are options to leave mail on the server with some systems, but if a message is flagged as read, good luck getting it again, unless you check your messages via a Web-based client or another computer.
Of course, if you only manage your email in your browser, the back-end scheme is not important. You probably only care whether it works or not.
POP’s other limitation comes into play when you have more than one device to check your messages. Here if you leave the messages on the server, each computer gets them, but messages flagged as read on one computer aren’t treated that way on another. Sent messages will be found on one computer and not the other. Synchronizing all of this stuff can be a chore and then some, even with a good backup system.
The other popular email system, the one I favor, is IMAP, short for Internet Message Access Protocol. Basically, under IMAP, your messages are all stored on the email server. If you read a message on your MacBook Pro at home, it is flagged as read also on your Windows PC at the office. The response you sent on one computer is found in the Sent mailbox on another.
In theory, IMAP ought to be a simple affair, but it’s not, because different email server software will manage the whole shebang differently. That makes it cumbersome for your email software to figure it all out.
Compounding this mess is the way it’s handled at Gmail’s recently-established IMAP system, where, unlike the common way IMAP is handled, messages aren’t stored in separate folders. Instead they are flagged with Labels. What this means is that a single message can end up in multiple categories. Depending on your sense of organization, that can be a good thing or a nightmare.
Rather than explain Gmail’s IMAP implementation, let me refer you to a lengthy and clear-headed article [1] from my friend Joe Kissell for all the particulars. Let me just say in passing that I am rather old fashioned in my way of handling email. I separate the messages from each domain, so I can better focus on the matters at hand, and I also use extra folders for organization. That may be retro to the developers of Gmail, but it’s the way I prefer to work, and that’s how the standard IMAP system was designed to function.
However, setting up an IMAP account on your Mac may not always be as simple process. First, you need to check to make sure that the mail server you’re using supports IMAP. From there, both Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage will handle the basics of the account setup process, but it’s not seamless.
A troubling and sometimes downright frustrating feature in Mail, for example, is the way it maps your local email folders to the ones on the server. Different systems may call your Sent box, for example, Sent Items. Junk mail folders may be labeled, instead, as Spam or Bulk. Rather than sort this all out, and frankly I can’t see where it presents a serious programming issue, Apple expects you to do it all by yourself.
So when you set up an IMAP account, and it’s configured properly, there will be a separate listing for that account in Mail’s Mailboxes pane. When you expand the listing, you’ll see folders representing the additional mailboxes. To properly integrate them in Mail, you have to select each mailbox, in turn, choose Use This Mailbox For, in the Mailbox menu, and designate what purpose it serves. The choices are, in order, Drafts, Sent, Trash and Junk.
Now you shouldn’t have a problem picking the right one, except that some email systems don’t create all the extra folders until you attempt to use the account. So I suggest you keep several headache pills around in case you find yourself prepared to open the nearest window and scream appropriate epithets at the top of your lungs.
Now, that’s not why they created “primal scream therapy,” but it’s also true that Apple needs to use more intelligence to help people sort out these email organizational issues. It would also be nice if they made an effort to make sense of the way Gmail has established its IMAP system.
Maybe I’m expecting too much, but my favorite surprise feature wish list for Snow Leopard includes some desperately needed changes for Mail. But I don’t expect any of it to happen.