I'm contemplating moving to Mt. Lion and using iCloud for email, synching between my desktop iMac and my MacBook Pro (and eventually, an iPhone). But I have these long-established POP3 accounts from our ISP, so:

Question 1: I think I can forward from those accounts to me.com, and assume I can create rules to have their respective messages land in the appropriate folders. Is that true?

Question 2: Can I then have me.com send outgoing mail out carrying the POP accounts as the From and Reply to return addresses? I.e. correspondents will not see any mail from me.com, only from the usual accounts.

Question 3: Will all the mail I receive and send automatically be stored and archived in my local Mail.app clients, just as it is now?

If not, what's a better option?

/Mr Lynn

---

"Hillbilly at Harvard"
Honky-tonk Country and Bluegrass
Founded in 1948 by Pappy Ben Minnich
Saturdays 9am - 1pm Eastern
WHRB-FM, Cambridge, MA
Streaming at [www.WHRB.org]
Be there!
New blog! [hillbillyatharvard.wordpress.com]

On the river in Saxonville.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2012 05:06PM by mrlynn.

Answer to #2 is no, unfortunately. Within iCloud Mail, Apple lets you create 3 "aliases" which are separate email addresses that point to your main iCloud email account. But, those aliases all end in me.com, so you wouldn't be able to make it look like you were sending from your POP accounts.

Answer to #1 is yes.

Answer to #3 is if you set it up as POP, then the messages should be d/l'd from the server and hence stored within Mail.app.

For #2, your best bet is Gmail or Fastmail.

---

Quote
pinkoos
Answer to #3 is if you set it up as POP, then the messages should be d/l'd from the server and hence stored within Mail.app.

Thanks for the response, pinkoos.

How does that work with multiple Macs (well, two anyway) accessing iCloud Mail? Would they both download and archive? Or just one? I'd really like my two machines to exactly mirror each other, especially Mail.app (I sync my Documents folder through SugarSync, but that can't handle Mail).

If you set up iCloud Mail as IMAP, then does all the mail get stored in the Cloud, so you can't get at it if you're not on the Internet? If so, that's a huge disadvantage, as then you're relying on Apple's servers and on Internet access any time you want to do a quick search for an old email message.

How does Fastmail work? If that's a better option, then I don't really need iCloud, except for Contacts and Bookmarks. Then why upgrade to the Lions?

/Mr Lynn

Quote
mrlynn
I'm contemplating moving to Mt. Lion and using iCloud for email, synching between my desktop iMac and my MacBook Pro (and eventually, an iPhone). But I have these long-established POP3 accounts from our ISP, so:

If syncing is a requirement, you'd be far better off switching to IMAP and leaving POP behind. Doesn't even have to be iCloud; just any provider that uses IMAP, even your own ISP.

Quote
mrlynn
Question 1: I think I can forward from those accounts to me.com, and assume I can create rules to have their respective messages land in the appropriate folders. Is that true?

Yes, rules and filters can be set up on the server side, or client side.

Quote
mrlynn
Question 2: Can I then have me.com send outgoing mail out carrying the POP accounts as the From and Reply to return addresses? I.e. correspondents will not see any mail from me.com, only from the usual accounts.

Neither Mail.app nor iCloud are very flexible in this sense; they only allow three aliases.

The simplest way most people send mail "from" one account, but receive at another is just to specify the former in the Reply To field.

Quote
mrlynn
Question 3: Will all the mail I receive and send automatically be stored and archived in my local Mail.app clients, just as it is now?

Yes, it is Mail's default setting (Accounts/Advanced) to cache all messages and attachments locally. You can also omit attachments, cache only messages that you have read, or none at all.



Modern email, even free accounts, are very flexible. How they're set up is dictated largely by personal preference, and specific needs.

If you don't want to blow the 20 bucks on MLion, set up an IMAP account with Gmail and experiment.

If this is strictly for email, I think you best bet is to switch your ISP accounts from POP to IMAP.

If you can manage with IMAP, then that is what I would recommend, especially if you want multiple Macs to be in sync with each other. Having said that, though, there may be an option for POP to leave the messages on the server (in addition to them being d/l'd onto your local machine) so that you could have access to the messages from either Mac. But, again, I think IMAP is considered the preferable option.

I think that when setting up IMAP there may be an option to d/l entire messages, so that even if you're without connectivity, you will have your full messages (rather than just headers) available for reading and replying (though the replies will remain in your outbox until you regain connectivity).

Fastmail is just another email service provider, EDIT [www.fastmail.fm]. It has different "membership" levels, one of which is free, but limited in it's scope.

I think it's pretty popular amongst the forumites here and it would definitely let you "aggregate" all your addresses into one inbox and also be able to send out as if you're sending from your different POP accounts.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2012 10:34PM by pinkoos.

Mail.app and other clients can allow POP messages to remain on the server, through user preferences.

But with simple read/unread flagging, and no syncing management, the burden falls on the user(s) to track which are in fact, really new, and how to manage all the various copies that have been downloaded by the different clients. An unnecessary burden in today's age.

As I noted, Mail.app's default setting is to download and cache all IMAP messages and attachments locally for offline reading.

Set up a fresh copy of OS X or Mail, enter the credentials, and it downloads all stored messages, in their folders, automagically.

Quote
Bimwad
If this is strictly for email, I think you best bet is to switch your ISP accounts from POP to IMAP.

Our ISP (RCN cable) does not support IMAP (neither do Comcast or Verizon, last I asked).

I'm certainly not wedded to POP. I just don't want my email archive stored in some cloud server, and not available on my local machines. If I can store the archive on my iMac, and also mirror it on my MBP (to use when traveling), that would be ideal.

Quote
pinkoos
I think that when setting up IMAP there may be an option to d/l entire messages, so that even if you're without connectivity, you will have your full messages (rather than just headers) available for reading and replying (though the replies will remain in your outbox until you regain connectivity).

Is that IMAP in general, or just Apple's, or Fastmail's? I'm still confused as to how IMAP works. How is it different from webmail (like Yahoo's)?

I'd rather stay away from Google.

/Mr Lynn

Note: According to an article on iCloud from last year, here:

[www.digitaltrends.com]

iCloud pushes your mail to your Macs (and other devices) every time you connect:

Quote

. . . Apple has a great deal of expertise in operating massive online services, and its iTunes Store continues to set an industry standard for consistency and reliability. And iCloud does hedge its bets by pushing data — including mail, calendar items, media, and photos — to users’ local devices transparently, rather than waiting for users to remember to sync up on their own. Thus, even if iCloud goes down for a while, the odds are good that users’ data will be up-to-date until the time of failure.

Does this mean that all of your mail, even if it's thousands of messages, is automatically stored locally as well as in iCloud's servers? So you can search your email without connecting to the cloud? I think that's what Bimwad was saying. If so, that's a Good Thing. Maybe I should think about phasing out my POP accounts, so that the problem of multiple 'From' aliases won't arise. . .

/Mr Lynn