Any comments?

Which mail service is better (in your opinion)?

IMAP:
+Can access all your email from any location (via imap://imap.umr.edu or http://minermail.umr.edu/).
-Must be online in order to read your email (even old messages).
-UMR seems to have problems maintaining their hardware. Some people have complained that they have permanently lost old email because of this.
-You are relying on somebody else to keep your email. You do not have it yourself.

POP3:
+Can access all your downloaded email without being online.
+This older standard seems to be more reliable (at least at UMR).
-Obviously, you must be online to download new messages.
-Can't access old messages from remote locations.

I'm sure that some of this depends on individual needs (being able to check email from one computer vs. using multiple computers).

Personally, since I don't trust UMR's servers to not lose my mail, I use POP3. However, since I also access my e-mail from many locations, I tell outlook to not delete the e-mails off the server until a) 5 days have passed or b) I delete them out of Outlook. That way, I keep about 150 e-mail on UMR's servers for easy access anywhere, and the rest archived on my computer for easy access and reference.

I find it more realistic to believe
case a) my hard drive would crash

than
case b ) the mail servers hard drive crashes and their backup is trash

This is my sixth semester and I haven't had any major email problems thus far using IMAP. Well, once I had 150 emails disappear then re-appear 34 days later. =)

All this of course is probably due to the fact that I still have not migrated to minermail.

-Ryan

yeah, but what happens when you need access to prior email, and the servers are down? Perhaps you don't experience this problem as much since you haven't migrated yet, but I can recall about 5 - 6 times in the last month that I've temporarily lost access to my exchange account because of a dead server or something else. Hell, I just got access to my email again a few min. ago after being without for 28 hours.

(not a new topic, but isn't it wonderful when e-mail seems to go down at the least convinient times)

I've always used POP mail accounts for email... until I came here. I find them really convenient-- you can pick up mail from another account easily, and mail filters are a lot easier to configure. The IMAP servers are ridiculous. Probably 1/4 of the time they refuse passwords and accept them five minutes later. Now we're experiencing all this downtime... plus the fact that the Dells keep breaking down doesn't help much. My overall opinion of the CIS department might be a bit higher if we had something stable. But hell, I'm just a student, I guess I should listen to Microsoft and let the A+ Certified technicians work everything out.