Do You POP or IMAP?

For those of you that have noticed, I haven’t posted a blog in a long time. There are many reasons for not posting, the top most reasons being that my son has had RSV (he is finally getting better!!) and I have returned to work (which keeps me very busy, which turns into being very tired). So I have had many thoughts as to what I would like to blog about during my little hiatus and it’s sad to say that I will restart by blogging about something that all my computer nerd co-workers would appreciate (for once!).

I have finally taken on the daunting task of switching to IMAP. AGGHHHHHH!!!

Ok, for most people this wouldn’t be such a big ordeal. However, as my drama-laden life has it, it’s a big thing for me. I think I have been popping (without leaving a copy on the server) my email from my email-hosting company (of which I am an employee) for about, oh, um, since the day I bought my laptop in June………..of 2004. And I am not one of those nifty email organizers that keep their emails and folders cleaned up. I think I save just about everything, well almost everything. So needless to say, I have a bunch of email to move. Most of the emails that I have, I need for work purposes, especially since I am in Finance/Accounting.

If you are not for sure how IMAP works, you can go here for a great explanation. Pretty simple stuff.

So anyhow, I asked Kevin what would be an easy way to do this. And of course his first response is to laugh at me and then ask why. In a nut-shell (on the way to pick the kids up after work today) he says, “Well, you can just drag and drop the emails with Outlook.” Which of course I interpret as, “You mean I can drag my email message from one folder in Outlook, to my IMAP folder in webmail?” WOW!! Talk about technology! So then I say, “You mean to tell me that you guys can create a tool to allow drag & drop between a desktop client and webmail, but not drag & drop within webmail itself??” Unknowingly at the time that we were talking about two different ideas he was like, “it’s not like we built the feature, outlook has it all worked out” (or something of that nature).

Once I get home (and feed Andrew, wait for Kevin to get back from returning to work because of some emergency, get Jordan some cereal in a bowl with some milk with a towel on the recliner (in her words), RSVP to a friend’s Christmas party, start a load of laundry, put the clean dishes away, put the dirty ones in the dishwasher, clean up the stack of mail that’s been sitting on the counter all week, straighten up the kitchen, get Jordan another bowl of cereal, and then greet Kevin) I get to try out the nifty little drag & drop feature that will make my life so much happier!!

HA!! It doesn’t work! So of course I demand another explanation of the process. It turns out that I had to create an IMAP user profile in Outlook, then drag & drop the emails between those two user folders….within Outlook. Ok, now that makes way more sense!

I have been moving my emails to my new IMAP folders for about 2.5 hours now. One of my folders was so large that I was getting server timeouts, so it had to be done in batches! lol!! I am on my last folder, my Inbox, which really means “pack-rat box”. If anyone from my engineering/support team reads this and informs me, “you could have done it an easier way than that!”………..your kitty dies!!! >:-[

Most of you are probably wondering by now, why am I doing this? After almost 3 hours I am asking myself the exact same question……

11:25pm and still going…yikes! I better get some sleep before the baby wakes up!!