About JC
Location
Austin, Texas
Home page/site
http://ungeni.us/
Author Biography
JC is a former Mac Genius and Mac-centric IT worker with a background in print advertising. He earned a reputation as a miracle worker when he saved the day at a new business pitch with the arcane knowledge that Apple’s ADB cables were nothing more than poorly shielded S-Video cables.
JC runs the Heroic Efforts Data Recovery Service and writes Ungenius, a tawdry tale of the life and times of a former Mac Genius.
You can contact JC via IM or via the contact form.
It’s IMAP! Unlike POP3 its not like your messages are going to be download only to the iMac, they will still be available to view on the Powerbook!
Filters, my friend. Filters.
I’m not sure why you should be fighting so hard on the client to do things like this — it’s IMAP!! The whole point is that the work is done on the server.
Your filters should be on the server — by the time you log in, every message should be where it is supposed to be already (other than deleting a few spams that sneak through).
If you’re counting on client filters to accomplish important tasks with your mail, you’ll never be able to use IMAP as simply as it should be. The mere fact that you’re having to create Rube Goldberg devices to prevent one IMAP client from checking your mail before another is proof of that.
That’s not quite the entire point of IMAP, though it is a big selling point. For some users. I store my mail mixed between local and remote folders, based on whether they’re personal, business, or otherwise, and a small number of other factors. There’s some server-side procmail filtering going on, and a lot of client side filtering going on.
My personal uses are such: I check all Inboxes and all server folders on iMac, but I only check one Inbox on my PowerBook. In my setup, it’s not a deal killer if both clients run at once, but it’s a little annoying.
There’s another good reason to kill unused IMAP clients though – server side memory constraints. Each connected client has a memory footprint that, due to repeated checking by the client, can’t effectively be swapped out.
If you’re using a corporate IMAP server that is well funded, this is not a big deal. If you run your own server through a shared hosting provider, on the other hand, that can be a killer.