IMAP Email questions

[rctneil]

Hi,

I have been using email for many many many years but i've always found bits of it to be confusing and i've learnt that understanding the foundation and what things actually do, rather than just being told how to fix things helps so much more. So here goes.

I have a basic IMAP mail account with a mail account provider. I could do with the questions below answering:

1. What is the "IMAP Path Prefix" option for? I don't need to know HOW to change it, I can do that no problem. Just struggling to find any info online as to what the benefit of changing this is and what changes it makes to your email client?

2. Most providers create a default "Archive" folder. Does this folder actually have any special meaning or functionality? In Mac Mail, I have set up the Mailbox Behaviors to set the Archive folder on the server correctly but just wondering it this default folder actually "does" anything or can I just safely ignore it? I typically have my own folders based on years and each year I just move the previous year's email into that folder.

3. Most mail clients, including Mac Mail, have a "Mark as Spam/Junk" feature or button. If this is used, is this solely for the purpose of the mail client itself or does it go towards giving hints to the spam/junk detection of the mail provider themselves? I have junk mail filtering disabled in Mac Mail but enabled in the settings of my mail provider, this way, no matter which device I check my mail on, I get the benefit of the filtering. I just need to know if using the junk buttons in the mail clients helps towards this or not?

4. I like having all my mail folders on my remote mail providers servers but would also like to backup the year folders I spoke of above locally on one of my machines and store it away somewhere (maybe my DropBox account as I have plenty of space in there). Is this possible? I just want a standards-compliant way of achieving this but online research doesn't seem to be leading me to any good suggestions.

I apologise if any of the above sounds basic or simple, I just want to try to complete my understanding.

Thanks,
Neil

 

[Russinating]

As far as I'm aware, archive does nothing.

And yes, depending on the provider spam marks have some outward effect. We use Gmail and they for sure log reports; reporting as spam and it asks you if it was just unsolicited or looks suspicious.

In a business setting using Google Workspace and spikes in spam reports also get flagged to admins.

 

[VersionMonkey]

Hi,

I have been using email for many many many years but i've always found bits of it to be confusing and i've learnt that understanding the foundation and what things actually do, rather than just being told how to fix things helps so much more. So here goes.

I have a basic IMAP mail account with a mail account provider. I could do with the questions below answering:

1. What is the "IMAP Path Prefix" option for? I don't need to know HOW to change it, I can do that no problem. Just struggling to find any info online as to what the benefit of changing this is and what changes it makes to your email client?

That depends on the configuration of the IMAP server - basically it's one of those things you set to whatever your provider tells you to use.

2. Most providers create a default "Archive" folder. Does this folder actually have any special meaning or functionality? In Mac Mail, I have set up the Mailbox Behaviors to set the Archive folder on the server correctly but just wondering it this default folder actually "does" anything or can I just safely ignore it? I typically have my own folders based on years and each year I just move the previous year's email into that folder.

Probably no different from any other IMAP folder you might create, but it's provider dependent. It's one of the IMAP "special" folders, but there's no definition of what should happen to messages moved or copied there.

3. Most mail clients, including Mac Mail, have a "Mark as Spam/Junk" feature or button. If this is used, is this solely for the purpose of the mail client itself or does it go towards giving hints to the spam/junk detection of the mail provider themselves? I have junk mail filtering disabled in Mac Mail but enabled in the settings of my mail provider, this way, no matter which device I check my mail on, I get the benefit of the filtering. I just need to know if using the junk buttons in the mail clients helps towards this or not?

That would depend on the provider, mostly, but would also depend on what the client actually does when a message is identified as Junk. I don't think IMAP has a "Junk" message flag, but there is a special folder attribute that a server can set to indicate that a folder should be used to hold Junk messages. So from the client side the only way of informing the server that the user thinks a message is junk would be to move it to the special folder (assuming the server has been configured to have one). I know Thunderbird can be configured to move Junk messages to a particular folder, I don't know about Mac Mail. It would then be up to the provider whether they actually did anything with messages in that folder (like train their filters), though.

4. I like having all my mail folders on my remote mail providers servers but would also like to backup the year folders I spoke of above locally on one of my machines and store it away somewhere (maybe my DropBox account as I have plenty of space in there). Is this possible? I just want a standards-compliant way of achieving this but online research doesn't seem to be leading me to any good suggestions.

This one I don't know the answer to. Looks like there are a few options for IMAP backup tools, but I've never used one.

I apologise if any of the above sounds basic or simple, I just want to try to complete my understanding.

Thanks,
Neil

It's been a while since I set up my email server, so hopefully the above is correct and useful.

 

[rctneil]

That's all very helpful thankyou!