IMAP with Snappermail
[From Rich Kendrick] About a week ago, my email provider (finally) upgraded their servers from POP3 to IMAP. I have been thinking about the advantages that IMAP would serve for me for more than a year now, but faced with the undesireable prospect of forwarding all my mail to a freemail IMAP service (or paying for it; ick!), I just left well enough alone. But now I have it! I no sooner finished reading the announcement email than I went and upgraded my Snappermail license to the enterprise edition.
Understanding how Snappermail handles IMAP, as compared to POP, took a little browse through the manual. The gist of it is, your IMAP server gets its own root folder, with all of your IMAP and related local folders layed out beneath it. Your previous inbox and local folders are left under the root folder called 'local folders.' Once that's done, you create whatever local folders you want, and optionally link them to the IMAP server folders. Snapper can also optionally keep track of 'Ghost' messages, which no longer reside on the server.
Unfortunately, there's a healthy handful of poorly documented IMAP features. There's something about about 'trashing deleted messages' that I'm not 100% on, and I had to discover the option to 'purge deleted messages' myself, as it isn't enabled by default (and by default, moving messages simply results in copies being made, with the originals left flagged deleted and never actually going away).
Once I understood how it worked, I had to figure out how exactly I wanted to put it to work. Without spending any additional money, I get 100 megs of space on my mail server. That's really not enough room to archive everything that I receive. And if I broke down my server into all of the many different folders that I use on my PC, I'd spend even more of my time manually filing email than I do already. After all, the whole point of using IMAP is to improve my email management, not add to my work load. So I decided that the most practical solution would be to organize most of my mail into two folders after it left my inbox: done and not done. All the mail that I had basically finished dealing with would be moved to 'done,' while all the mail that I couldn't finish dealing with (like stuff with links best seen on a desktop browser, or very large attachments) went into the 'not done' folder. I have a few other odd folders for important other stuff, like 'keepers,' 'sent,' and stuff from my wife. The next big step was setting up my desktop email. I use a (fantastic) program called Pegasus on my PC. It supports some very sophisticated sorting rulesets. I previously had it set up to sort all of my incoming mail out of my inbox and into its appropriate folder (like 'from dad,' 'Palm related,' 'eBay,' etc.). But now I had elimated the added step of basically reading my mail twice. I already knew exactly which emails needed my attention, and which ones could be readily archived. So I needed to make a ruleset that would make a copy of my mail into the appropriate folder, but also allow me to keep a significant archive on the server (I figured 90 days would do) and wouldn't make the mistake of duplicating my messages every time I ran the archive filter.
This was a little tricky at first, but I hit on a fairly simple solution. Basically, my ruleset checks to see if I've archived the message before (Pegasus can assign a color to a message; once I archive a message, I have my ruleset turn it dark purple), then it checks it against all of my sorting filters. Once done, it changes the message color, and checks to see if it's old enough to be deleted. Pretty quick and easy, all in all.
I've come across a few other helpful features. I had previously BCC'd myself a copy of all my sent mail so that I could archive that too. I discovered that my mail server too supported some basic filtering, so now all my copyself messages get auto-sorted into the sent folder. Nice.
A few quick tips I learned while experimenting with this new setup: don't set snappermail to move stuff to the card immediately. This makes managing your attachments really sluggish (I'm guessing it has to copy from the card to the RAM and back, which is way way too slow). Each folder you set to sync takes about as long to receive as an individual POP account. So sync wisely. For instance, I set up my Spam folder to sync to my Treo, but not to sync automatically. This way I don't have to wait through something I don't need on every retrieval. And be sure to tell Snapper not to remove any of your mail during its daily archive. If it does, you'll be unable to see your old messages even though you've left them on the server.
All in all, I'm very happy with my new setup. Snapper handles most of the IMAP stuff simply and easily. I can keep a much larger archive of mail on my server. And now I don't need to wade through 30-40 read emails to figure out which one still needs my attention.
