Moving to IMAP and away from Microsoft

Well, with the advent of courier-imap and multi-session login for IMAP now available we’ve decided to move our sales@waytotheweb.com joint mailbox from POP3 access using Public ShareFolder to using an IMAP account on our local server. I’ve moved over to Thunderbird and am enjoying using it. There are some important functions from Outlook that I miss, especially having it remember frequently used folders to move mail items to, though there is a workaround. I am enjoying being able to view emails in the format they arrived in rather than the bastardised format that Outlook stores email – it still amazes me how an email client can both store email bodies in a different format to which they were delivered and to also ruin email headers to make them next to useless. Unfortunately, Outlook is a well featured email client, but I’m not sad to see the back of it.The move was important to us. We keep all email, going back to before 1998 when we started this business and so it needs to be a robust solution. The main gotcha was that courier-imap doesn’t like you using either a slash or a dot in folder names, which meant for a lot of renaming for some parts of our folder structure. Other than that, the only real issue with Thunderbird/IMAP is the somewhat flaky new email detection, but I’m getting used to it 😉