This history lesson as background serves as an introduction to email rules because an IMAP server (or MS Exchange or Gmail) can hold not just messages and their statuses, but also filing instructions. You check email from your work laptop, iPhone, and Android tablet, and all devices show all your messages, their status ( e.g., read or unread), and replies sent from any device. You can easily imagine the benefit of a server-based inbox because you experience it every day. The actions a user takes on a device, such as reading, responding to, or deleting a message, are reconciled to the server, which transmits those changes to other devices when those devices check for email. All mail resides on the server and copies are downloaded to each computer or device. With IMAP, as well as similarly functioning proprietary protocols like Microsoft’s Exchange and Google’s Gmail, the “truth” about your inbox lives on the server. If you lived in an outlandish world (at least until the 21st century) with multiple computers with email, there was no easy way to keep all computers’ inboxes in sync.Įmail-heavy users realized this problem quickly and POP’s eventual successor, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), was conceived in 1986. Once retrieved by the computer, the messages were deleted from the server. It dated from 1984 and, for our purpose today, was designed so that a single computer would retrieve messages from a server. Fifteen or more years ago, before the advent of broadly-used mobile devices, most email services operated on the POP email protocol (POP being an acronym for Post Office Protocol). If you insist on keeping email open – and even more so if you have the app set to alert you when you get a new arrival – I promise you will benefit from a keen understanding of email rules, their creation, and how letting Outlook (or Gmail or Apple Mail) handle some message routing and filing for you will alleviate annoyance and allow you to focus on real work. Even though numerous studies demonstrate its distractive tendency, most people also keep email open and running on their computer throughout the day, just inviting interruption by anyone who happens to send them a message. Email is by far the most used business application.
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