12 Facts About IMAP

IMAP was designed with the goal of permitting complete management of an email box by multiple email clients, therefore clients generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them.

Email clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them.

IMAP was designed by Mark Crispin in 1986 as a remote access mailbox protocol, in contrast to the widely used POP, a protocol for simply retrieving the contents of a mailbox.

The IMAP Working Group used RFC 1176 rather than RFC 1203 as its starting point.

An internet draft of IMAP2bis was published by the IETF IMAP Working Group in October 1993.

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An IMAP Working Group formed in the IETF in the early 1990s took over responsibility for the IMAP2bis design.

Keywords, which are not supported by all IMAP servers, allow messages to be given one or more tags whose meaning is up to the client.

IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria.

IMAP IDLE provides a way for the mail server to notify connected clients that there were changes to a mailbox, for example because a new mail has arrived.

IMAP specification has been criticised for being insufficiently strict and allowing behaviours that effectively negate its usefulness.

However, push IMAP has not been generally accepted and current IETF work has addressed the problem in other ways.

Unlike some proprietary protocols which combine sending and retrieval operations, sending a message and saving a copy in a server-side folder with a base-level IMAP client requires transmitting the message content twice, once to SMTP for delivery and a second time to IMAP to store in a sent mail folder.