FastMail IMAP Usage Example

The guide below is an example of how to use IMAP with Outlook Express so that you can easily access the same emails at home/work and through the web interface. Many of the points are also relevant to Netscape and other email programs, so it's worth reading even if you don't use Outlook Express. It also demonstrates how IMAP lets you have greater control over your email, by allowing you to store all your email in one place, or by allowing you to choose which messages to download.

DSL/Cable/Permanent Connection Users

When you have a high speed permanent connection, you can basically use FastMail as if they were local folders on your hard drive. We've found response times (even to the other side of the world) make the service fairly much interactive. As new emails arrive, or are moved between folders, they appear immediately within Outlook Express. There is generally no need to synchronise folders, and you can access all your messages through Outlook Express or the web interface, even at the same time. This set up is recommended if you tend to stay permanently connected to the Internet. If you tend to disconnect your DSL/Cable interface, see the section for modem users below.

The main advantages of this set up are:

• You can access all your messages at home, work or through the web interface in every folder
• You can use all of these access methods at the same time without having to worry about 'where' a message is. It's always at FastMail. Eg
  • You go to work, you can access all your emails through Outlook Express/Netscape/etc or the web-interface at work
  • You go to a client site, you can access all your emails (including any attachments, etc) through the web-interface
  • You go home, you can access all your emails with Outlook Express/Netscape/etc
• You get to choose when to download large emails or attachments. Only when you need an attachment do you have to download it.

Modem Users

When using a modem, things are a little trickier, but still much more flexible than POP. Outlook Express allows you to synchronise individual folders and messages between your local machine and FastMail. By default, only your Inbox is synchronised, but this is easy to change. You can also create local folders on your machine and move messages to those folders.

Default Setup

After setting up Outlook Express to use IMAP, you can click on the server icon ( see cursor half way down on left hand side of image below) to show the folder synchronisation properties. You should see something like the image below.

We note the following:

• The hierarchy of items on the left shows:
  • 'Local Folders' holds all the folders located on your computer's hard drive
  • 'fastmail' (it may be named differently depending on how you set up your IMAP account) holds all the folders for your account located on the FastMail IMAP server
• The list of folders in the pane on the right shows:
  • Currently only 'Inbox' is marked for synchronisation
  • The rest of the folders contain between 0 and 679 messages, but aren't synchronised locally

Synchronising a folder

When you synchronise a folder, it means that a copy of all the messages in it is kept on your local hard drive, so when you disconnect from the Internet, you can still read all the messages in that folder. If a folder has a lot of large messages, this can take a while to do, but it is done intelligently, so that next time you synchronise, only new messages are downloaded, or deleted ones removed. Any existing messages are left as they are.

To enable a folder to be synchronised, simply click the checkbox under the 'Synchronization Settings' list in the pane on the right hand side.

Then, when you click the 'Synchronize Account' button, or select 'Synchronize Account' or 'Synchronize All' from the 'Tools' menu, all messages in both the 'Inbox' folder and the 'Humour' folder will by synchronised at both FastMail and on your local machine.

You can then disconnect from the Internet and still access and read messages in the 'Humour' folder.

A few things to note:

• The icon on the bottom right shows us the we are offline, but we can still access the emails from the 'Humour' folder
• The server and folder names on the left are grey, also showing that we are offline
• The 'Humour' folder has a little blue arrow on it's left side, showing that it is a synchronised folder
• If you make any changes to the 'Humour' folder using the web interface, those changes will be reflected in the 'Humour' folder the next time you connect and synchronise

You can repeat the above setup for any folders you want to be able to access while not connected to the internet.

Synchronising single messages

Sometimes you may not want to explicitly synchronise folders between FastMail and your local machine. Instead, you may just want to download a copy of an individual email from FastMail to your local machine. This is very easy to do. All you have to do is click on an email in a FastMail folder. It will download, and when done, will be available locally even when you are offline. You can tell that an email has been downloaded because the envelope icon will change from a broken envelope to a complete envelope.