Barney Adds Support for

IMAP E-Mail Clients

Beginning in August 1998, Barney began supporting IMAP mail clients in addition to Pine (via telnet) and POP mail. The added support of IMAP now provides students the most flexibility when choosing how to access their mail.

What is IMAP?

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. The key benefit of IMAP is that students are able to access their Barney mail from a graphical e-mail client such as Netscape Communicator while keeping the mail itself on Barney. The allows the student to use Pine while in computer labs and other locations on campus and Netscape Mail from their residence hall and use the same mailboxes for each. This is different from a POP client which downloads the mail from the server to the local hard drive. http://www.imap.org provides more detailed information on IMAP.

Who should use IMAP?

IMAP is going to be most beneficial to those students that use e-mail a lot, move around campus a lot, and want to be able to access all their mail and mailboxes at the same time. Up until this point, the best option for this type of student was to use Pine for all of their mail. With IMAP, they now have the advantage that they can use a graphical client in their room and use Pine while moving around campus.

Setting up IMAP from Netscape Communicator

Beginning in fall of 1998, Netscape Communicator 4.05 and Pine are the two officially support e-mail clients for student mail. Eudora Lite 3.1 will no longer be supported. Both Netscape Communicator and Pine are IMAP compatible (Eudora Lite was not). To set up Netscape Comminicator to use IMAP instead of POP, do the following:

  1. Select "Preferences..." from the Edit menu.
  2. Click on the "Mail & Groups" tab in the Preferences window to list the options under Mail & Groups.
  3. Click on the "Mail Server" option.
  1. Select the IMAP option.
  2. Click on the "More Options..." button.
  1. Set the "IMAP server directory" to "Mail".
  2. Click "OK" to close the More Options window.
  3. Click "OK" to close the Preferences window.
 

Now, when the mail portion of Netscape Communicator is opened, Netscape will connect to Barney using IMAP instead of POP. It will automatically detect the Pine folders (if any) that you've already created and you will be able to file messages into these folders from within Netscape. You can access the mail portion of Netscape Communicator by selecting "Message Center" from the Communicator menu.

Potential issues of using IMAP

IMAP is still new on Barney and has not undergone extensive load testing. As such, if IMAP severely degrades the performance of Barney it will be disabled. Also, IMAP will be slightly slower than POP because it is reading mail off of the server, moving files around on the server, etc., whereas POP downloads the mail from the server and then handles everything else on the local computer.

Reporting Problems with IMAP

It is important that any problems found with IMAP be reported so that we can work to resolve them. All IMAP problems should be reported to .

 

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