At IU, why doesn't UITS support POP mail?

At Indiana University, UITS discontinued POP mail in order to efficiently allocate computing resources by standardizing with the more secure and robust IMAP protocol. There were several reasons for the move from POP to IMAP:

• POP works by copying or transferring your email to your local hard drive, removing your mail from the server. If the connection failed during the transfer, your mail could have been lost, and UITS usually couldn't recover it since it was no longer on the server.
  
  
• Because POP moves your mail off the server, you had to manage your POP email in multiple locations (e.g., the email client on your office computer and your home computer may have kept different copies of messages in your Inbox).
  
  
• If POP mail clients logged in too frequently when checking for new mail, the performance of the mail servers for all UITS accounts was degraded.
  
  
• IMAP allows you to keep your mail in a central location on a mail server. This makes mail and file management easy and requires only one login to the server. Using IMAP, it is more likely that UITS will be able to restore items from your account, if the need should arise.
  
  
• IMAP is a more advanced protocol than POP, having features such as allowing access to public and private mail folders, searching mailboxes, and flagging messages as read.

If you need instructions for setting up your mail client to use IMAP, you can search the Knowledge Base using the name of your mail client, the name of your operating system, and the terms configure imap .

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