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As simple as sending an e-mall message may seem to be, there are serious Issues like usability, feature sets and protocols to consider when selecting an e-mall client for your organization. If you're not using a proprietary e-mall system like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, you've got many options before you, including HTML support for administration and messaging. In this Buyer's Guide, we'll discuss the relative merits of the Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) and
Post Office Protocol (POP) standards, and introduce the most critical features for the next generation of e-mail clients.
Do IMAP or Do I POP? In choosing an e-mail client, you must consider not only its general overall functionality but also the serverside organization of your messaging system, which may limit your choices. One of the first considerations regards your system's use of IMAP and/or POP.
IMAP is fast becoming the preferred e-mail protocol, primarily because of its server-side mail management features. In comparison to the incumbent POP, IMAP offers many more capabilities. However, they come at the expense of heavier demand on your server. If you've got the back-end horsepower for it, IMAP can save your users a lot of work and increase the speed of e-mail communications drastically.
Among IMAP's features are selective downloading, serverside folder hierarchies, shared mail and mailbox synchronization. Frequent travelers should demand IMAP clients because IMAP will let them selectively
fetch individual message parts or the structure of a message without downloading it. The protocol also lets clients utilize the server for message searches, minimizing the data transferred over the network. For example, let's say you check your mail while in the field via a 14.4-Kbps connection and find that you've received a 5-MB ZIP file from headquarters. With an IMAP mailer, you can download everything except the attachment. Although some POP
mailers let you skip messages that are larger than a predefined limit, IMAP mailers handle them much more gracefully. By downloading only the headers at first, IMAP lets you determine what to read and when.
POP and IMAP both utilize a drop-and-store method for mail delivery: The server constantly accepts incoming mail and "drops" it into mailboxes...