Do your servers support IMAP?

IMAP is a relatively new method of connecting to a server and reading incoming mail. Many modern e-mail programs support IMAP as well as the older POP3 standard.

The two methods handle mail differently:

  • POP downloads copies of each message from the server to your computer, which then has its own separate copy of each message. Subsequent changes to that message on your computer don't affect the server or any other POP program reading the same mailbox. POP usually also immediately deletes all messages from our servers unless you take extra steps: since your computer has the only copy of the message, you need to rely on your own backups.
  • IMAP always leaves the messages on our servers — in fact, the server copy is the only copy, but you can have multiple IMAP connections to the server showing you that copy. The server knows when you've read a message, deleted it, replied to it, put it into a folder, and so on. Any other IMAP program reading the same mailbox (including our Webmail pages, which use IMAP behind the scenes) will know about all those changes. The messages you've read are backed up using our backup system.

For most programs, we recommend that our customers use the POP3 method. However, our servers do also fully support IMAP, including SSL encrypted IMAP.

The instructions we provide for POP mailboxes also apply to IMAP mailboxes. When you create a "POP mailbox", the mailbox on our server can actually be read using either a POP3 or IMAP connection.

To set up your mail program to use IMAP, you'd use the same server name, username, password, etc. The only changes are the connection method (choose IMAP instead of POP) and the port number of the incoming mail server (port 143 instead of port 110).

IMAP settings for particular programs

These pages explain how to set up IMAP for some mail programs:

Technical details

Technically advanced users may be interested in the following:

  • Our IMAP servers use the standard port 143 for normal IMAP. They also support optional TLS security on port 143 and pure SSL security on port 993.
  • The IMAP folder prefix is "INBOX". Many mail programs will automatically detect this, but others may need you to enter this prefix into the account settings if you want to be able to use the same folders on your mail program via IMAP that you see in Webmail.
  • The "capabilities" (IMAP extensions) supported by our servers are "IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS".