Path: csiph.com!news.swapon.de!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Daniel James <daniel@me.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.mobile.android
Subject: Re: What's your favorite email app?
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2016 23:57:54 +0100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 32
Message-ID: <VA.00000bae.06e97aca@me.invalid>
References: <XnsA65098FAD6F54nilch1@wheedledeedle.moc> <nn5qtr$gs5$1@dont-email.me> <XnsA650A2FBB4F5Anilch1@wheedledeedle.moc> <nn5ud5$u5n$1@dont-email.me> <XnsA650C11092305nilch1@wheedledeedle.moc> <nn6l7t$tot$1@dont-email.me> <XnsA651C79DAD29nilch1@wheedledeedle.moc> <ge8y65filx1f$.xpwvde7o8tpj$.dlg@40tude.net> <nn815j$8je$1@dont-email.me> <XnsA651876C89AFBnilch1@wheedledeedle.moc> <nn8bf8$f3b$1@dont-email.me> <XnsA651A1086B866nilch1@wheedledeedle.moc> <nnaloq$hsl$1@dont-email.me>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="e16147c885e59d133f2ef7d44168f0c1"; logging-data="25681"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+iG0h3NxjoyjBOZvk26NX2"
X-Newsreader: Virtual Access Open Source http://www.virtual-access.org/
Cancel-Lock: sha1:9QYvpmJ+CAmiYwnythWryrRwT2Q=
Xref: csiph.com comp.mobile.android:33086

In article <nnaloq$hsl$1@dont-email.me>, The Real Bev wrote:
> Are you telling me that I can convert gmail accounts from POP to
> IMAP now?

I suspect the issue here is not so much what Google does or lets you do 
as what your mail client does/clients do.

The Google mail servers will let you use either POP or IMAP, and 
whichever you use you access the same database of messages. Google is 
(as you've noticed) a bit unusual in that it has a notion of which 
messages on the server have previously been read, and doesn't show 
those messages to a POP client (unless you disable POP and re-enable it 
again).

Your mail client, though, may well store the messages it downloads in a 
different way depending on whether it used POP or IMAP to talk to the 
server. POP has no notion of mail subfolders, for example, so the 
client may well use a flat database for POP servers and a 
folder-structured one for IMAP. This would make it non-trivial to 
switch from POP to IMAP, and quite hard to convert from IMAP to POP -- 
what do you do with all those folders that no longer have any meaning, 
for example?

That's why changing from POP to IMAP collection (or vice versa) on the 
same server may require that delete the service from your mail client 
and create a new one using the other protocol.

-- 
Cheers,
 Daniel.