Apps

POP Goes the Gmail: Taming the Beast (1 of 2)

Email can very easily get out of control. Anyone who uses it knows the pain of trying to keep up on replying to everything, weeding out the crap, and trimming down the Inbox so you can sleep at night. For many, email has become more hassle than convenience. For the current generation of students, email is often not fast enough. Hence the popularity of IM and text messaging. Communication preferences aside, it is safe to say that email will be around for long time. Our job is to learn how to tame the beast. I’ve been trying some things out that I wanted to share. Maybe they’ll help someone else out there too. First, an explanation.

A while back, I wrote about my decision to forward my ASU email to my old Gmail account. If you’re interested why I made the switch, go read the post. It’s been over two months since I switched, and it last I checked, ASU’s Gmail still has not been switched to the new version. I’m not sure of the details, but from what I’ve read, it has something to do with the fact that ASU’s services are through the Google Applications suite.

It wasn’t hard to have my ASU email forwarded to my old account. I followed the steps to set up a simple automatic forwarding rule. This has worked perfectly for the past two months. Earlier this week, I noticed some problems. Some of my mail was not being forwarded properly, and there was significant lag time between when a message showed up in my ASU account and when it showed up in the account I actually use. Sometimes this lag was an hour, sometimes several hours.

As I was attempting to submit my first story for the State Press to my editor last Tuesday, this was seriously bothersome. I wanted to cuss and spit and throw things. Heavy things that would cause a lot of damage and give me the greatest sense of relief. I was waiting for some pictures to be emailed to me and they never showed up in my Inbox. When I logged into my ASU account, there they were, unread and un-forwarded. Because I now have deadlines and due dates that I have to meet for the Press, I can’t risk missing an email again. So, I’m trying something new.

I turned off the automatic forwarding in my ASU account. Using the Mac Mail application on my laptop and my iMac at home, I set up IMAP access for both my personal Gmail account and my ASU account. I could have also used POP, but I didn’t. If you have a choice between POP and IMAP, you shouldn’t either. Google gives a quick explanation why IMAP is the superior choice:

Unlike POP, IMAP offers two-way communication between your web mail and your email client(s). This means when you log in to your account using a web browser, actions you perform on email clients and mobile devices (ex: putting mail in a ‘work’ folder) will instantly and automatically appear in your web mail (ex: it will already have a ‘work’ label on that email).

In addition, IMAP provides a better method to access your mail from multiple devices. If you check your email at work, on your mobile phone, and again at home, IMAP ensures that new mail is accessible from any device at any given time.

Finally, IMAP offers a more stable experience overall. Whereas POP is prone to losing messages or downloading the same messages multiple times, IMAP avoids this through its two-way syncing capabilities between your mail clients and your web mail.

If you’re trying to decide between using POP and using IMAP with your web mail account, we recommend IMAP.

Thankfully IMAP access was available in both of my accounts, otherwise this would not have worked. (Even better - with Gmail, IMAP access is F-R-E-E. You can’t even get POP with Yahoo! Mail without paying a fee.)

In the second part of this post series, I’ll detail the steps of how I set up my ASU account. For me, it was not as easy as 1-2-3. It was more like 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8…27…54…

I’ll try to make it easier for the rest of you. Check back tomorrow for Part 2.