Outsourcing Your Email? Try Using IMAP

First of all, IMAP is not a webmail service like Gmail. It is a protocol (or method) for retrieving emails. You can use IMAP method with your current email client. In other words, if you love Outlook, you don’t have to switch to something else to connect to your mailbox using IMAP. Here’s why it makes sense to switch to IMAP when outsourcing your email.

Photo by T. Al Nakib

Let’s say your customer service address is help@something.com. You want your assistant to check in on the address and you also want to be able to check in once in a while. You use Outlook but your assistant is a Thunderbird fan. You both don’t want to switch.

You’ll set up the email address account as usual – make sure your host supports IMAP – most do. Give this email account a bigger mailbox than you’d normally set. There’s a reason for this we will discuss later.

Now, when you or your assistant sets up Outlook or Thunderbird to check the email account, choose IMAP instead of POP. Enter the username and passwords as usual, just as if you were setting up POP mail.

By doing this, both you and your assistant can keep your favorite email clients. All emails are kept on the server – not on you or your assistants computers. Which means, if she checks the mailbox today and answers some emails, tomorrow she reports in sick and you have to take over. The whole conversation between her and your customer is available for you to view. If you used POP, then you could be missing part of the conversation because the emails have been downloaded to her computer.

Another plus of using IMAP, if she had marked an email read, it will also show up in your email client as read so there’s no confusion.

Finally, IMAP allows both of you to be connected to the email account simultaneously. I think this is good way to get started outsourcing your email because you still maintain control over the account and can check in anytime. You also don’t get lost if you have to pass the torch to someone else and it’s already included in the tools you use. No extra software investment required.

The only thing is – because emails are stored online – it will take up your web space so you’ll need enough web space to store old messages but usually, these aren’t that much and is a small issue.