Converting Eudora from POP3 to IMAP

If you are already using Eudora with a POP3 account, these instructions tell you how to change the account type to IMAP.

If you are configuring Eudora for the first time read: New Eudora IMAP Configuration

The first step is to locate the "Personality" tab. This is the rightmost tab under the folder listing in Eudora (circled in red):

Click on it to see the list of Eudora personalities. If you have only created one, default, personality in Eudora it will be called <Dominant>. If you have created multiple personalities they will all be listed here. You want the POP3 account you are modifying:
Right click on the <Dominant> personality (or other account), and select "Properties":

This will open the Properties dialog box:
Select the "Incoming Mail" tab, select IMAP as the Configuration and Required,STARTTLS for secure connection:

Press "OK" to save settings.

Note: Versions of Eudora older than version 7 do not always work with TLS encryption. If in the next step you get an error saying the connection to mail.rpi.edu was dropped, set security to "never".
At this point Eudora may ask you for your password. Enter it into the dialog box and press "OK".
Return to the folder listing by clicking on the mailbox tab (far left under the Personality listing). You may or may not see your folder list at this time.
By default, Eudora will wait 20 seconds before performing background actions. For POP3 this is (mostly) tolerable, but for IMAP it is excruciating. Go to the "Tools/Options..." menu, and scroll down to ``Background Tools'':

Change the "Wait for" value from 20 to 0.
Finally, you may need to refresh the folder list to display your IMAP folders. Right-click on the account name (usually <Dominant>), and select "Refresh Mailbox List" from the pop-up menu:

Your IMAP folders will now appear:

That's it! You can now open an IMAP folder by double clicking on it. Double click on "Inbox" listed under the <Dominant> account:

screenshot

Eudora will download the minimum headers needed to display the message index. When you select a message, it will download the full message from the IMAP server. (You can configure Eudora to pre-download all the messages.)

Your Eudora POP3 account has now been converted to IMAP. All of your old Eudora email is left in local folders (usually under Eudora in the folder listing). IMAP folders are listed under <Dominant>, or the name you gave the account. You can move email between Local and IMAP folders, but only email in the IMAP folders will be available via other IMAP clients, such as Webmail.

If you are using Eudora filters: Existing filters will continue to filter email to local folders. If you want the email to instead be filtered to IMAP folders (so they can be viewed from other clients) you will have to edit each filter, changing the destination to an IMAP folder. Local folders can still be used for archiving old messages, helping you keep under quota.

There are other configuration settings you may want to change, including configuring an IMAP trash folder, and putting a purge button on the toolbar. These and other configuration seetings are discussed in: Suggested IMAP configuration settings for Eudora.

Last modified: April 13, 2007