IMAP FTW

[Black Viper]

I have made several (big) changes in the last few days with regards to my email usage and forum information.

1) I am now using IMAP and not POP3 to collect email. This change actually allows me to sync email in a more efficient and timely manner. With Gmail, emails sent by "myself" (meaning, the same account used for login) are not synced by default (and cannot be changed or forwarded as far as I can tell). I have previously spent a great amount of time with email generated from the forums. Now, using IMAP, emails sent by the forums (even though they are sent "by me") are directed and synced in Thunderbird as soon as they arrive. As a result, I can respond and be notified much faster to new users and posts then manually checking POP3 via Gmails web site.

2) With the IMAP change, emails generated by the forums actually are useful to me. I am now "notified" of new topics and posts, as well as immediate  reports violating my forum rules. This will greatly reduce my lag time in responding and useless "refresh" of the forums are now a thing of the past.

I thank you, kind reader, for your support and I hope to serve you better in the future.

[IH8U]

I'm kind of surprised you haven't been using IMAP the whole time. I thought the only reason people still used POP3 is because that's all their ISP offered. 

[Josh780]

I thank you, kind reader, for your support and I hope to serve you better in the future.

Improvements or not, I'm more than greatful that your site exists and is back after the time it was MIA for a little while. Thank you for all of the work that you've done as well as the information that the forum members here have contributed.

[Black Viper]

I'm kind of surprised you haven't been using IMAP the whole time. I thought the only reason people still used POP3 is because that's all their ISP offered. 

While I had my email server up, I used POP3, so when I transferred everything over to Gmail, it was a basic configuration that I had no desire to change.

I used Mercury 32 (4.01b, released Dec 2004) before I shut down the site, but since it was not updated for a long time and I assumed support had dropped for it (no updates until May 2007), I made the switch over to ArGo's Mail Server. However, the IMAP module for that was optional and so I carried on with POP3. After ArGo stopped putting out their regular mail server and was working on transferring to the .NET version (and wanting more money), I decided to fully switch over to Gmail, but POP3 had it's own issues outlined above.

While I took care of my own server, it was not an issue to check mail every minute through my LAN network.

IMAP is definitely the way to go, especially if you read mail on different devices and/or from different locations, etc.

Mercury looks to be in active development again, so if I did decide to bring back up an email server, I would look at returning to Mr. Harris' fine products, but use IMAP this time around.