Because it has that remote capability, IMAP is most likely to be adopted by corporate users who see roaming features as important, says Paul Hoffman, director of the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Internet Mail Consortium, an industry group made up of vendors and users. IMAP lets them do that. Users dial in to the server, and POP plops the messages into their in-box. It then deletes that mail from the server. Both protocols have been around for more than 10 years.
Users can apply mail filters and search agents on the server.
And messages can be picked up from any machine, anywhere, Rassner says. But vendors have interpreted the ambiguous IMAP4 specification in different ways, which has led to inconsistencies among mail clients and servers, Rassner says. For example, users may not be able to read an attachment in a Netscape Mail file in the Eudora Pro E-mail program. And those incompatibilities among vendors will be ironed out, he says. Someone's stalking your directory.