does apple mail download all gmail messages

Or rather, you can, but you need to maintain a connection to send messages, receive notifications of new messages, and otherwise interact with the mailbox.

You also have to remain connected to the mailbox, so you can’t really download and run off with your messages. IMAP is more complex than POP, and has more points of failure.

Of course, the advantages are not without their disadvantages. This is in contrast to POP, where you connect long enough to download all new messages – and anything that you need access to that isn’t in your local archive – and then disconnect. When you need to see the contents of an email, you download it – a matter of milliseconds, typically – and can work on it. With an IMAP protocol, you’re connected to a mailbox as long as you’re working on it. IMAP has several advantages due to the way it works. I include this information more as trivia than as anything useful to most of you. You don’t need to know any of the dirty details, of course. IMAP has gone through several revisions, with the current being Version 4 Revision 1, or IMAP4rev1. They function in different ways and both have their own benefits and drawbacks. It is also one of the few truly global protocols so many other technological protocols end up fragmented, with different apps and different clients using different protocols.Įmail, indeed, has two different protocols: IMAP and POP. IMAP is one of the two main email protocols, and is the acronym for the Internet Message Access Protocol.

Does apple mail download all gmail messages