This is a showstopper for professionals where most emails must ALWAYS be kept somewhere and you know where that. The rules are also muddy as to what your clients will see and how much (and for how long) the server will keep your mail. Your IMAP email clients only synchronize a configured number of emails, not generally everything. Instead, an IMAP server is meant to be the holder of your emails. For example, email clients using IMAP do NOT usually download and keep ALL your emails. The disadvantage of IMAP is that the definitions of how it works varies considerably between servers and email clients. Likewise for deleted emails in TRASH or saved emails in an ARCHIVE folder.
So, if you sent 1 message from each of 3 devices, all 3 clients would see all 3 emails in their SENT folders. Like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, IMAP synchronizes the emails and folders on the client with those and the server. When a client connects to an email account via IMAP, the client and the server communicate both ways. Since the sending email client knows nothing of your other devices and most likely cannot connect to them - let alone their email clients, your SENT emails stay on the sending machine, unbeknownst to your other clients.Ī newer protocol called IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) attempts to allow multiple devices to see the same things no matter what device you are using. It is your email client that stores a copy of sent emails in the SENT folder of that device, if the client options were set to do so. The mail you create and send to others is sent via an outbound SMTP server which does little more than forward your email to the rest of the world. Your device's email client fetches email from the server and that's it. The most common shortcoming of the POP protocol is that it's a 1-way trip. You can always count on having all your mail using POP. Thunderbird handles POP much the same way.
E.g., an email account set up in Outlook to use POP downloads all your new mail on the server mail and stores them in a PST file on your local computer. Using the POP protocol, an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird simply downloads all emails received at the server in your name and then optionally deletes at the same time, deletes them later. The advantage of the POP protocol is its simplicity and clarity of operation. To wit: How keep a permanent collection of your emails regardless of the policies and configurations of email providers. The questioner has broached a most important topic that I've seen little written about.
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