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Solution

IMAP stands for „Internet Message Access Protocol“ and is a way to manage e-mails. Users who manage e-mails by IMAP leave their mails on the mail server for good and manage the folders of the server themselves. Imagine IMAP as a windows through which a user looks from his computer or smartphone onto the server to read mails, edit mails, send mails or store mails.

As e-mails are never “downloaded”, the same version can be accessed from many devices at the same time. Changes made by one device become visible on all other connected devices immediately.

This comes at a high price. Because users are forced to have enough storage space ready at all times. Because e-mails are never downloaded, the free storage space is continuously decreasing by incoming mails or sent mails. Finally one must expand the storage space or delete old messages. Further users risk to lose all their mails when the storage space providers goes out of business or a technical failure occurs. Users have also frequently reported issues with their folder management, because different mail clients (e.g. Thunderbird, MS Outlook) use different root folder paths by default.

Bitpalace recommends to always download mails to your own computer on a regular schedule. You could set-up a POP3 connection for that but instruct that client to leave all downloaded messages on the mailserver. In that case POP3 will not delete downloaded messages so that all IMAP users can continue to work with the downloaded messages.

Overview of frequently asked questions