IMAP





Short for Internet Message Access Protocol (Previously called Interactive
Mail Access Protocol). It is used for accessing emails on a remote server
while leaving them there instead of deleting them. In this way, users can
access email from several different machines, once configured to use the
IMAP protocol to access a certain account. (POP clients are typically
configured to delete email messages from the server once they are accessed,
making it possible to read one's email only on the machine first used to
access it).

Unlike POP, IMAP includes functionality for remotely managing messages as
well as mailboxes. IMAP has commands that allow clients to create, rename
and delete folders on the mail server, as well as commands for moving
messages to and from such folders. With IMAP, messages can also have
meta-data associated with them. For example, IMAP servers keep track of
which messages have or have not been read (such states are called "flags" in
IMAP).

Other mail protocols include SMTP and POP.

RFC2060 - describes the IMAP version 4 revision 1