BlueMail Push or Fetch? Which is best for you?
With all of the configuration possibilities that BlueMail offers, “Push or fetch?” is a feature most users need some assistance in deciding which is best for them.
When you hear “POP”, think Fetch and when you hear “IMAP”, think Push
POP stands for Post-Office Protocol, which hey, sounds pretty awesome. Many mail clients, such as BlueMail, work seamlessly with POP. Well, besides the name, there really isn’t anything too particularly spectacular about POP. It’s an old and outdated method to manage your emails from a time when cell phones were lucky to have brick breaker on them. BlueMail is a fantastic example of how the right email client can be adversely effected by POP. With POP, or Fetch, the mail server is an expensive and glorified mailbox that you still have to fetch your emails from.
You may be asking, “But why would they ever make this? Who would possibly want to manually fetch anything these days?” and you wouldn’t be wrong. However, POP really took off during a time period when Betamax and VHS were in a battle for superiority (the 80s for millennials).
POP is a locally oriented protocol because when it was developed, the cost of storage was almost $300 per Mb! Why would you pay to maintain multiple copies of an email on many different devices? The idea of passing around only one copy of an email became very appealing for businesses and IT departments.
For a while this worked. The average user only had one computer at work and the infrastructure wasn’t there to be able to work from home easily. But when more and more devices began to access the same email, a massive disadvantage was brought to light. POP could not keep the same email synchronized between every device and to fix this would require data, and lots of it.
Well as time progressed and Moore’s Law sprang into action, the storage cost of data went from nearly $1 per Mb at the turn of the millennium, to a minuscule 1/3rd of a cent per Mb as of last year. Devices became much more widespread and the excuse that data was expensive was no longer valid. The industry needed a new way to handle email. Something faster, more efficient and reliable needed to be developed; and fast.
IMAP was born and addressed perhaps the biggest shortcoming of POP. Maintaining a synchronized copy of the same email no matter where or when the email was accessed. This is where BlueMail comes in. By having this synchronized copy, features such as Staring an email, Creating a Task list, and even backing up accounts become more fluid with BlueMail.
So if IMAP is better in literally every way, why is it still being used?
Simply put? Money. IMAP is a better system which enables push services, but for many users setting up their own inboxes, POP is more cost effective from the hosts.