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Accessing Mail Remotely

Mahogany supports two protocols for accessing remote mail servers: POP3 and IMAP. While POP3 is more commonly available, IMAP is definitely the superiour protocol and should be used where available. It will generally give you more functionality and will be much faster over slow connections. Both normally require you to log in with a username and password, but can be configured to work anonymously if supported by the server. IMAP additionally allows you to access any mailfolder file on the remote machine. For example, if you use Mahogany on a remote machine ``atwork.company.com'', you might have your local INBOX (which could be /var/spool/mail/MyUserName on a unix box) and also your ``New Mail'' folder, which might be ``/home/MyUserName/.M/New Mail''. With IMAP, if you log in from home, you can not only access your INBOX on the atwork.company.com mail server, but also the ``New Mail'' folder there, by telling Mahogany to use ``/home/MyUserName/.M/New Mail'' as the path to the mailbox file. Like this, you can access any mail folder on that machine that you have access to locally, making remote access to your mail much more flexible than just accessing your new messages.


next up previous contents
Next: Sending Mail Up: Reading Mail Previous: Other Folders   Contents
Charlie & 2001-04-19