IMAP-Based Email--You Can Take it With You
The email programs that are supported by C&C offer you the
ability to read your email from various locations and
computers.
In the campus-wide electronic mail (email) system at the University of Washington, your incoming email resides in a repository called an inbox. Email messages in your inbox are available to you from anywhere on the campus network, the worldwide Internet, or from your computer at home. This is possible because of something called the Interactive Mail Access Protocol or IMAP.
For example, in Pine, when you open a remote mailbox and type I to see the Mail Index screen, Pine asks the mail server for a list of all the messages in your inbox. Information such as who sent you the message, the date it was sent, and the subject of the message is displayed for each message in the list. When you press V to view a message, Pine asks the mail server for the contents of that message.
Although the new messages you view in PC-Pine or Mailstrom
appear to be on the computer you are using, they actually
reside in the inbox on the mail server. They are not on
your computer until you save them.
Having your email delivered to a mail server is far more reliable than having it delivered to your desktop computer. While mail servers are always turned on, your desktop computer may not be. Any attempt to deliver email to your computer when it is turned off results in the email being delayed, and if your computer is off for too long (e.g., several days) the mail will be returned to the sender.
IMAP also lets you read your incoming email messages from anywhere on the Internet, including from your computer at home. However, until a campus-wide dialup IP facility is available, which would permit use of PC-Pine or Mailstrom from home or hotel, your dialup or remote mail access may require logging into a Uniform Access computer.
To view your messages, first dial in or use telnet to connect to your Uniform Access account, and then start Pine. The graphic above shows how you can reach your inbox on the IMAP mail server from different locations and different computers.
Since all IMAP-based mail programs can access the same inbox, any operation you perform on your inbox in one email program is reflected in your mail the next time you use another program. For example, if you delete a message from your inbox using PC-Pine in your office, the message will not be in your Pine inbox when you dial in to a C&C computer from home later that night.