• Acceptable Use Policy

  • Whitman's Bandwidth

  • Care and Feeding of Your Computer

  • Datatel Update

  • Faster Email

  • Why IMAP is Cool

  • WCTS Institute Builds E-Presentation Skills

  • Mulitmedia Development Lab Usage Seeing Dramatic Growth

  • Choosing a Good Password

  • Printing

  • Don't Just Delete...

  • Rockefeller Grant and CwTI

  • Security Issues

  • It's Thesis Time!

  • Undergraduate Conference
    •

    E-mail has us more connected than ever before. But all this connectivity comes at a price: All too often we can find ourselves overwhelmed, inundated, even drowning in a sea of electronic correspondence! How can a person keep their sanity and get control of their E-mail? One way might be through the use of an IMAP mail client.

    An IMAP mail client (fancy techno-speak for a particular type of E-mail program) has a couple of real advantages when it comes to managing your E-mail.

    • IMAP mail programs are easy to learn! An IMAP mail program is very similar to other mail programs that employ a Graphic User Interface. That is, it uses the same "point and click" method of interaction that other mail programs use.
    • IMAP mail works well for accessing your mail from both on campus as well as from off campus. You can use the same program at your home and your office!
    • The nature of IMAP provides for a backup of your messages. Backing up E-mail is becoming a real issue as more and more of us use our E-mail systems not just to send and receive messages, but to store important information.
    • If you frequently need to access your mail from two or more different locations on a regular basis, IMAP is the way to go. You will never find yourself in one place, not able to access your mail that is in another.

    How is all this possible? With an IMAP client, messages are stored on both the mail server (MARCUS) and on the machine that you would typically use to read your mail. When you check to see if you have new mail, any new messages that you have received since the last time that you checked your mail are copied from MARCUS to your local machine. At the same time, any messages that you have deleted on your local machine are then deleted from MARCUS. This synchronization of your local machine (or machines, if you access your mail from several locations) and MARCUS is the key to IMAP mail, and is the feature that allows for all of the benefits described above.

    You might be wondering just what you have to do to get all these wonderful features of IMAP. The answer is . . . not very much actually! In all likelihood, if you currently use a "point & click" mail interface, all that needs to be done is a bit of configuring. If you currently use PINE, or if you want to change to an IMAP client from GroupWise, there is a short install routine that must be run prior to configuring. Several good IMAP clients currently available are Netscape Mail, Eudora, Outlook, and Outlook Express. If you wish to make the change to an IMAP client, any of these programs would be a good choice. Just contact the WCTS help desk, and we can get the process started!