Which mail service to choose. POP3 and IMAP: history of mail protocols and collection of letters via IMAP in Yandex.Mail

To work correctly and highly efficiently on different boards, you need to have a whole package of mailboxes; for this you need to create 10-20 mailboxes for yourself. Due to some problems, it is better not to do them on Mail.ru, Gmail.ru, Gmail.com. These problems lie in the fact that the above-mentioned mail services have for some time now begun to intensively combat spam. And they just equated Oriflame (letters somehow related to it) with spam.

Accordingly, you run the risk of one day stopping receiving letters from applicants, or suddenly you will have problems sending letters, or an unexpectedly harmless letter you sent from someone to someone will not arrive. Although, many consultants work with these email services and do not observe any particular problems, it is better not to risk it.

It is more convenient to work with mailboxes through a mail program, for example, The Bat or Mozilla Thunderbird (an application for the Mozilla browser), or through other similar ones, so as not to work through the browser, since it will not be possible to open a dozen mailboxes in the browser at the same time. And any email program will allow you to easily work with letters from all mailboxes.

Please note that the names you created to work on the boards of your mailboxes should NOT be similar names, especially if you register in one sitting - without leaving your chair. Otherwise, message board administrators will simply identify you and delete you after you register all your accounts. Since on any serious board you can have only one account per person.

Or you can do it even simpler and work with just one mailbox, which will itself collect letters from all your mailing addresses. Yandex mail will handle this perfectly. The setup is simple and won’t take much time.

Setting up Yandex mail to collect letters from different mailboxes

To begin, you log in through your browser to your pre-prepared Yandex mail to collect letters from all mailboxes. Then, at the top right, find the symbol indicated in the first picture and click on it.

After this, you will see a drop-down field indicated on the second screen. You need to click on the link “COLLECTION OF MAIL FROM OTHER BOXES”.

Then you will be taken to the page for setting up mailboxes from which your Yandex mail will collect letters from all your emails. Everything else is intuitive. There is, however, one limitation - one Yandex mail can collect all messages from a maximum of 10 different mailboxes, but this is not a problem at all, for example, you can make 2 or 3 mailboxes on Yandex to collect mail.

The next step is to activate the settings for access to these mailboxes via the IMAP and POP3 protocols in the settings of collection boxes on Yandex. The two screenshots below show how to get to these settings.

On all mailboxes from which your Yandex mail will collect all letters, you must also do the same, providing access to these mailboxes via the IMAP and POP3 protocols. There the settings are made in the same way. True, when collecting letters using this method through the Yandex collector, there is a small, not always convenient moment - the collection of letters does not happen instantly, it is carried out only several times during the day. But I think this is not so critical.

To instantly receive mail to one mail collector on Yandex, you need to configure not the collection of letters, but forwarding (forwarding). This is also not difficult to do. You can view the mail settings for redirection at this page Yandex hints.

When you communicate on the Internet for many months and years, you end up with a lot of letters, and that’s hundreds of megabytes and gigabytes of correspondence and files. Often these are not just useful files, they can be used to remember and restore life milestones. This data is more valuable than the contents of the local computer disk.

Sometimes the task arises of switching to a new and more convenient mail system, but the accumulated archives of letters get in the way. Throw them in the same place? It's a pity. Passwords are forgotten. It happens that mobile numbers and email addresses entered to restore them are lost. One day you may lose your archives forever. Download to local hard drive? Copy to a disc or flash drive? But they are unreliable: they break, get lost, deteriorate.

The most logical solution is to import the mail archive into a new mailbox. But it is not enough to do this once, because important letters may continue to arrive in the old mailbox. You can set up unconditional redirection of all incoming mail to another address, and from a technical point of view this is the most preferable option. But we are not robots, and a technically economical solution is not always convenient to use.

For a long time, the only way to transfer mail archives between mail systems with constant background synchronization of new messages was the POP3 protocol. The ability to collect mail from external POP3 servers is implemented everywhere and well. In any case, as good as the protocol allows, and it has a lot of unpleasant limitations.

POP3 dates back to 1984, when one of the employees of the Computer Science Institute at the University of Southern California, Joyce Reynolds, published RFC 918, a proposal for a standard protocol for receiving email (POP - Post Office Protocol). Four years later, the third edition of the POP protocol appeared, and the current, modern version of the POP3 standard was published in the spring of 1996, almost 17 years ago.

An important principle of POP3 is optimization for short connections to the mail server in conditions of expensive and slow communication. Initially, within each connection, it was supposed to download all letters from the mailbox to a local disk, and then clear all the contents of the mailbox. Your mailbox for letters and newspapers at the entrance of an apartment building works in exactly the same way. The first version of POP didn't even have commands to read individual emails, only to download everything completely.

Now it’s hard to imagine that the emails weren’t stored on servers. They were downloaded to the local computer at the first opportunity and read, sorted by recipient, topic and importance locally.

It is interesting that the POP2 protocol provided the ability to work with several folders on the server, but it turned out to be unclaimed, and the protocol itself did not receive distribution. Therefore, in POP3 the FOLD command, which implemented this feature, was removed. POP2 was ahead of its time.

Now in POP3 there is no way to download a folder structure from the server, only a “flat” list of letters, consisting, as a rule, of either incoming letters or a combination of user folders. Read and importance flags cannot be taken into account. Despite these limitations, the protocol is still widely used, mainly due to its simplicity and very wide support across all devices.

There have been many attempts to improve POP3, but none have been as successful as the IMAP protocol, which has developed almost in parallel since 1985. The history of IMAP is also quite interesting. For example, the first implementation was made in Lisp, and its legacy remains forever in the protocol in the form of S-expressions, which encode complex server responses such as BODYSTRUCTURE.

The author and ideologist of IMAP, Mark Crispin, laid down the principle of permanent storage of letters on the mail server. IMAP turned out to be one of the early “cloud” Internet protocols, designed to accommodate the unreliability of local storage on a personal computer. In addition, a person may have several personal computers and other terminals for working with mail - basic things for us today.

The latest version of IMAP, 4rev1, is described in RFC 3501, which was released in 2003. Despite its apparent age, the protocol turned out to be alive thanks to the extension mechanism provided at the early stages. This mechanism, of course, is also not without its shortcomings, but nevertheless, it has allowed various people to release more than fifty public extensions, many of which were developed very recently and are widely used.

A modern mail system without support for IMAP access is nonsense. For several years, Yandex.Mail has supported IMAP as a server for working from such popular client programs as Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, as well as numerous mobile clients. By the way, it was thanks to smartphones that IMAP received a second wave of development. If on personal computers for quite some time now the vast majority of users have opted for a web interface for their mail, then the situation with mobile devices is completely different. Fast and beautiful IMAP clients, for example in iOS, are forcing us to reconsider the approach to IMAP as the choice of exclusively professional and “advanced” users.

Recently, Yandex.Mail also added an IMAP client function - a mail collector from external servers via IMAP - in addition to the POP3 collector.

The function requires virtually no configuration and is designed to work in the background after the first activation. When collecting mail via IMAP, due to the protocol features described above, in your mailbox you will see the folder structure that you were used to when using your previous mail system. All read messages will remain read, and unread messages will remain unread.

You can enable collection of folders in Yandex.Mail from all mail systems that support the IMAP protocol. The protocol is not simple, each IMAP server implementation has its own quirks, and it was important for us to first handle the most widespread option of switching from old mail to new.

As before, in addition to the letters themselves, contacts from the address books of the most common email services are imported.

The IMAP protocol is noticeably more complex than POP3, both simply in terms of the set of capabilities and commands, and in some basic operating principles. For example, IMAP uses tagging of client commands and server responses to those commands, which allows the server to respond to commands in a random order.

Each command must be preceded by some identifier - a tag, which will then be used by the server when generating a response to this command. This allows the “conversation” between the client and the server to be completely asynchronous - the server has the right to respond to the client’s commands in any order, since tags make it possible to unambiguously match the response to a previously issued command. Moreover, the server can execute such commands simultaneously, speeding up the speed of working with mail, and Yandex.Mail can use this. At the same time, this requires a special approach to programming both the client and the server. If at this point you remembered the sequence numbers mechanism in TCP, then write yourself a +1 in geek cred :)

To implement an IMAP collector inside Yandex.Mail, we used our asynchronous framework for writing any high-performance network services, called yplatform. Its source code is currently closed, although we are considering the possibility of publishing it. Follow the news.

Go to Yandex.Mail, set up an IMAP collector - and you will always be able to find any old letter. Surely Yandex knows how to search.

WebAsyst Mail allows you to view and respond to letters arriving at your email addresses located on various mail servers, for example: mail.ru, yandex.ru, gmail.com.

We will call email addresses located on other servers external. A separate thread is created for each external address in the Inbox folder. New mail is checked automatically every minute. When new messages arrive, the name of the mailbox in which the messages were received is highlighted in bold.

In fact, WebAsyst Mail does not retrieve messages from an external mail server, but only learns about their arrival and reads the headers. Of course, if you open an email by clicking on its header, WebAsyst Mail will also read the entire contents of the email. However, the letter itself will remain on the mail server and will be accessible through the mail service's own web interface or from an email program such as Outlook or The Bat!.

WebAsyst Mail allows you to perform all basic operations with messages received in external mailboxes:

• viewing messages and attachments
• Reply to the sender and forward the message to other addresses
• deleting or moving to the WebAsyst Mail folder for permanent storage (with these operations the original message will be deleted from the mail server)

Why do you need to collect messages from other mail servers?

As a rule, each mail service provides its own web interface for working with mail. However, it is convenient to use the WebAsyst mail collector, for example, in the following cases:

1. When you need to see all correspondence arriving at different email addresses in one place - on one web page.
2. When you usually work in the office using the Outlook Express email program and go on a business trip without an office computer. In this case, WebAsyst Mail will give you access to all your mailboxes from any computer connected to the Internet.
3. When you need to provide access to letters arriving at different addresses to other employees without the need to forward these messages - WebAsyst Mail allows you to flexibly configure access rights for each folder.
4. Finally, when your mail server simply does not have a web interface, or it is not easy to use.

• Mail collector from your mailboxes on other mail systems

Welcome guests to the blog site!

From the last article you learned how to use Yandex mail.

Set up mail collection from other email accounts;
- add a user to work with several mailboxes simultaneously.

Why set up a mail collector in Yandex mailbox? How to use it?

Let's assume that you have several mailboxes (email): , and . In order to use them conveniently, you can set up a collector, for example, for Yandex mail.

What happens after setup?

Letters from all connected mailboxes will go to the Inbox folder on the main mailbox. Which is very convenient, because you will not need to double-check all your accounts; you will only need to go into one mailbox and view all incoming correspondence.

How to set up collection of mail (letters) from other mailboxes on Yandex mail?

In order to view letters from a specific mailbox, click below on the name of the email from which mail is collected.

This way you can add multiple mails to the collector.

How to add users to Yandex mail for quick switching?

In addition to the collector, you can connect several additional accounts, but already only Yandex mail. They will be displayed in the upper right corner of your account when you click next to the photo.

To add a user to work with several mailboxes simultaneously, click on the photo and select ADD USER.

Enter your other email and password in the appropriate fields and click LOGIN.

After this, the account you switched to will be displayed in the upper right corner to the left of the photo. And when you click on the photo, the entire list of other boxes will be shown, which you can quickly navigate through. You can add several of them, but, I repeat, only on the Yandex platform.

I continue a series of articles about the function of collecting mail to one main email box from any others located on any mail services. In the previous article we talked about setting up mail collection on the Yandex service, which is easy to do. And in this article I will talk about how to do the same in another, no less popular service today - Mail.ru, where many people still keep their main email box, despite the fact that, for example, the GMail service has clear advantages (we've talked about setting up mail collection in Gmail). But as they say, to each his own and sometimes it’s just a matter of habit :)

Setting up mail collection in the Mail.ru service is as easy as, for example, in Yandex. Just a few simple steps and everything will be ready, mail will begin to flow from the mailboxes you have connected to one on Mail.

The process of setting up mail collection in the Mail.ru service

First of all, log into your Mail account, where you will collect mail from other email accounts and open the “Letters” section (that’s where the mail is located).

Now you need to go to your mail settings. To do this, click the “More” button at the top and select “Settings”.

You can also open the settings by clicking on your email address in the upper right corner and then selecting “Mail Settings”.

Then go to the “Mail from other mailboxes” section.

The first window for connecting a second email box will open.

Let me remind you that the second email box from which you want to collect letters can be located on any service, not just Mail!

In the example for this article, we will consider connecting a mailbox located on the Yandex service.

In this window you need to specify the login and password for the mail you are connecting. If the mailbox you are connecting is on one of the services listed below, then click the corresponding button at the top, enter the full address of the mail you are connecting below and click “Add mailbox”:

If the mailbox you want to connect is located on some other service (not from the list above), then click the “Other mail” button at the top, after which you need to enter the full address of the mail you want to connect, the password for it and click “Add mailbox”.

If you have not yet logged into your second email account in this browser, which you are connecting, then in the next window you will need to enter your login and password for it. Example:

After that, click “Allow” (you allow mail on Mail.ru to use some data from the connected second mail).

If everything went as expected, you will receive a message stating that the collector has been added. Now you need to choose which folder to collect mail in: in a specially created folder by the name of the mail you connected or in your inbox. It's up to you to decide, but, in my opinion, it is more convenient when mail collected from another mailbox goes into a separate folder. One way or another, this can then be configured by filtering letters.

The “Apply filters to received messages” option means that all the filters that you already have configured in your main mail on Mail will also apply to mail received from the connected mailbox. It's up to you to turn it off or not.

That's it, the mail collector is set up! Now, within a few minutes (sometimes the process takes longer if there are a lot of letters on the connected mailbox), mail from the second mailbox will begin to flow into your main mailbox.

In this way, you can connect as many mails as you like to collect.

How to separately see all letters from connected mail?

You can view letters separately if, when setting up mail collection in Mail, you specified that letters should be collected in a separate folder with the name of the connected mailbox. In this case, open this folder and see all the necessary letters. Example:

If you did not immediately set up the receipt of letters in a separate folder, you can set it up at any time by opening the created collector (more on this below).

Configuring the created mail collector, disabling and enabling it

Sometimes you may need to make changes to the settings of the mail collector you created, as well as disable it or enable it again.

This can be done in the same place in the “Settings” - “Mail from other mailboxes” section, where you initially created your letter collector.

Here you will see the created faucet. If you need to disable it or enable it again, click on the corresponding switch. If you need to open the collector settings, click “Edit”.

And the same settings for the mail collector will open as at the stage of its creation (see).