In this tutorial I’m going to show how to switch an account from POP to IMAP. And to be honest, you don’t need an iPhone to benefit from this setup. IMAP will allow you to check your email from work or some one else’s computer and have access to all of you email folders and sent emails. Also if you compose a new message on your iPhone or other computer, the new message is synced to all computers and iPhone using the IMAP account.
First disable email checking in ALL accounts so that there are no other processes happening while you set up Mail. From Apple’s Mail application menu go to ‘Mail > Preferences’ and select the Accounts tab. Go through each of your accounts and from the Advanced tab deselect “Include when automatically checking for new email”.
Next, select the plus sign at the bottom of the Accounts window to create a new account.
Enter your account description, name and email.
Enter your incoming server info. This is supplied by your email provider and is usually the same as your POP email settings.
Enter you outgoing mail server info as well.
Mail will then check the outgoing mail server before creating the account. This process can take a few minutes.
Once the account is created, deselect the automatic checking for email like we did on all the other accounts.
This step is only taken if needed. In my case, my mail server stores all mailbox folders inside of the INBOX folder. Some server are set up differently, it is best to find out from your provider. Try INBOX to start, we’ll see if that works on step 6.
Once the account is set up properly, if there are folders in your local account, Mail will show the basic Sent, Draft, Trash folder under a Globe icon. This icon is the mail account in your server. To tell Mail these folders should be considered special folders, just choose a folder, i.e. trash, and go to the top menu and select ‘Mailbox > Choose This Mailbox For’ and select it’s type. Trash should be Trash etc.
To copy emails from the POP account to the IMAP account, just create a new mailbox by clicking on the plus sign at the bottom left corner of the Message Viewer window. When prompted, choose your IMAP mail account from the location popup window and name the folder you choose to copy.
Start by noting how many emails are on the local folder you are copying then select them all and drag them to the corresponding folder in the IMAP server. In the screenshot above we are copying all the email from the selected Archives folder to the Archives folder in the All Forces IMAP server at the bottom of the list. The speed of the transfer depends on how many emails you are transferring, their file size and what upload speed your internet connection is. Open the Activity Viewer window to keep track of the progress.
Once all the emails of the folder are copied to the server, double check that they all copied by selecting the folder on the server and looking at its message count in the window name. If all emails copied, control+click the local folder and select Delete from the pull down menu. Sometimes the deleting step needs to be repeated.
Once you are done copying all folders, open the Inbox Mailbox by clicking on the triangle and move all the Inbox emails from the POP account to the Inbox of the IMAP account. Do the same step for the Drafts and Sent folders. Trash is optional. Some of you like to undelete I am sure.
Double check that there are no more local email folders with any emails in them. And that there are no emails in the local POP account Inbox, Draft or sent folders. I can not stress this enough, this step can NOT be undone. Your will loose emails if you still have them locally in your POP account. From the menu select ‘Mail > Prefereces’ and go to the Accounts tab. Select the old POP account and press the minus icon to delete his account. This deletes the POP email account.
Next, go through each of your accounts and from the Advanced tab select “Include when automatically checking for new email”. Now close the Preferences window and from the to menu select ‘Mailbox > Synchronize All Accounts’. This step will synchronize your local emails with the server. This process will take a little while the first time you do it.
Sync up your iPhone to transfer your new Mail account settings. When completed, unplug it and turn it on. From the iPhone, select the Mail application, select your email account and you will notice you now have all of your folders listed there. You might need to wait a little bit the first time as the phone synchronizes with the IMAP server. Tap on a folder to see the emails in them. Also, when reading an email in the inbox, tap the folder icon and you get the folder list where you can move the email to.
Switching from POP to IMAP is relatively painless but it does take some careful attention to avoid any email loss. I have moved accounts in as quick as half an hour ad as long as a day and a half due to lots and lots of attachments and slow upload speeds. Keep in mind, most hosting services do have a size limit for your account so keep an eye on your attachments. Mail provides a nice function under ‘Message > Remove Attachments’ where you can remove large attachments after you have copied them to another place in your computer. I have a dynamic folder called Attachments that automatically gets populated only with emails that have attachments that gives me a quick view off all my attachments. Also, keep in mind that IMAP is not as snappy as POP mail. But the slight delay, which is only noticeable when you first select a folder, is more than made up by the fact that you are always accessing your email directly whether it’s from your Mac, webmail or the iPhone. Also, iPhone shows a maximum of 50 200 emails per folder. So if you do need access to ALL of your emails, try doing sub-folders or just check your IMAP mail through a browser in the iPhone.
That’s all for now. Happy emailing…
I’ve had my iPhone for months now and, until about two weeks ago, I was secretly unhappy with how it handled my email. I discovered that the phone’s lack of spam-filtering power was annoying.
Mail always sorted my mail invisibly, and its built-in spam filter kept the junk out of my Inbox.
It has taken me a while, but I’ve discovered a solution that leverages several great pieces of technology to make Mail on the iPhone work the way it should.
The truth is that this is pretty easy. All I’ve done is send all of my personal email to a secret Gmail account that nobody knows about. Then I connect to Gmail from the phone and Gmail’s powerful server-side filters keep the junk out. The only hang-up is that when I send people mail, I want them to receive it from my personal account, not my Gmail… but there’s a fix for that, too.
Step one is to get a Gmail account. Even if you already have one, go ahead and send yourself an invitation for another one and give it a crazy log-in that nobody will ever know. Once the new account is created, tell your other email account to auto-forward all of your mail to your secret Gmail account. This means that any mail sent to your personal account will show up in your new Gmail account.
The next step is to fix things on Gmail’s end so that when you send people mail, it looks like its coming from your personal account and not your secret Gmail identity. You can do that from within the Gmail interface in your web browser. Click on the Settings link in the upper-right corner of the Gmail interface (next to your secret name) then click on the Accounts tab. The first option says “Send mail as:” and there’s a link there to add another email address. Click it.
In the resulting pop-up, add your personal account and then check it. Google will have sent you a verification email with a link in it to click to prove that you can access that account. Once you do that, head back to the Settings screen and click the link to make your new “Send As” address the default.
Whew! Once that’s finished, you can add the Gmail account to your iPhone. One caveat: DO NOT use the iPhone’s built-in Gmail account tool when you add the account. Instead, set the account up as an Other account, then click the IMAP tab and use the following values:
IMAP Account Information
Name: What you want your name to appear as when you send
Address: Your personal email address (not the secret Gmail address)
Description: Whatever you want
Incoming Mail Server
Host Name: imap.gmail.com
User Name: Your secret Gmail login (without the @gmail.com part)
Password: Duh.
Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
User Name: Your secret Gmail login (without the @gmail.com part)
Password: Duh.
You can look at the Advanced settings, but you shouldn’t have to touch them unless you want to. When you’re done, you should be all set up. Now when someone sends an email to your personal account it will show up on your phone via Gmail, but when you respond it will look like your response came from your original account, not your Gmail. If you like, you can even add the account to Mail on your Mac.
Via: http://macapper.com/2008/03/06/3677/
Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using theĀ Dropbox website.
Let’s say you’re editing a document at home. As soon as you click ‘Save’, Dropbox will sync this same file to all your other computers instantly and automatically. It’s as if you saved the document to all of your computers. This gives you the freedom to work on any of your computers and always have the files you need.
You can easily share entire folders or photo albums with Dropbox. Simply put the folders you want to share in your Dropbox, and invite people to them. You can also send people links to specific files within your Dropbox. This makes Dropbox perfect for team projects.
Every time you put a file in your Dropbox folder it is automatically backed up to our secure servers. If your computer has a melt-down your files are safe on Dropbox and can be restored at any time. Our free 2GB account is perfect for backing up your documents. We offer larger accounts (up to 100GB) for backing up your music and video collections.
Every time you save a file in Dropbox, Dropbox syncs it to our secure servers. Dropbox keeps a history of every change made so that you can undo any mistakes and even undelete files. By default, we keep the last 30 days of undo history for all your files. We also have an unlimited undo option called “Pack-rat”.
Dropbox replaces:
Not convinced yet? Then take a look at our list of features. Otherwise, go ahead and get started:
The words to the Think Different¯ television commercials that Apple ran in the late 1990s.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.