Q – A friend has a Windows 8 machine where they are using an administrator account rather than a user account. When they clicked on a PDF they received the message, “The app cannot be launched, UAC is disabled.” [UAC is User Account Control, the feature in Windows that asks your permission when something is about to modify the system in a way that could be harmful, as in to install a new program or make changes to the registry.]
A – The message is telling me that UAC has been disabled and that enabling it might solve the problem. Since this is a new machine, I suspect that this was the first time that anyone tried to open a PDF. In Win8, if Acrobat is not installed, the default PDF viewer is a “Modern” (aka: Metro) app and all Modern apps are disabled when UAC is turned off. This is detailed in the User Account Control help in Win8. My initial reaction at the meeting was correct in concept but not totally accurate. I assumed that the problem machine was trying to run Adobe Acrobat for the first time, which was false. Acrobat requires administrator privileges when it runs the first time so you can accept the licensing agreement but with UAC turned off, this would have proceeded without warning.
<opinion>No one should ever encounter this situation. Disabling UAC returns your computer to the bad old days when anything could change the registry and do real harm without any warning. Most people want to set their Windows user account as an administrator so they can install software conveniently. This is fine so long as UAC is watching to warn you of impending changes. If UAC is incessantly asking you to allow changes and you don’t know why, then something is very, very wrong and you need to find the source.</opinion>
Q – I had a problem in Microsoft Outlook and called Charter Support. I was getting the message “connecting to the server for more information” whenever I used Outlook to move messages, etc. The technician suggested I create an IMAP account which I did. Once we tested the IMAP account and sending a message worked, it started downloading all my messages, creating duplicates on my computer.
A – First some background: IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is an alternative to POP (Post Office Protocol) email access. It was specifically designed for people who access their email from more than one computer. When you log into an IMAP email account, your email client (in this case Microsoft Outlook) exchanges some pleasantries with the server and determines which messages are new and which have been moved to folders or changed. The client then synchronizes these changes with the server. This synchronization is two-way in that changes on the server are brought to the client and changes on the client, such as organizing emails in folders, is replicated to the server so that your folder structure exists on the server. Now when you access the server using IMAP from another computer, the folder structure is automatically synchronized to this second computer. The WikiPedia entry (wikipedia.org/wiki/Imap) has a section “Advantages over POP” which is recommended reading. When using IMAP on all of your devices (laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone), all devices will have access to all messages, even when moved to folders. Messages on the server are never deleted until you delete them on the client. This change (the deletion) is then synchronized to your other computers when they connect. You can even upload messages from other email accounts to the server simply by dragging and dropping them from one mailbox to another in your email client. Email clients on tablets and phones offer a way to limit the amount of email synchronized to local storage on the device, generally by selecting a time frame (number of days or weeks) to synchronize.
Now that we have that background, we can address the specifics in the question. Yes, IMAP has duplicated your messages on this computer, but they are kept in a separate mailbox file from the messages in the POP account; in other words, they are not mixed. The IMAP account does not know about your email folders because they do not exist on the server. You are correct that you are now receiving each email twice on this computer – once in POP and again in IMAP. Therefore, you should turn off updates in the POP account in Outlook. The next question is all the work involved in organizing messages into folders. There are two approaches: safe or risky. The safe approach is to recreate those folders in the IMAP account. Outlook makes this easy. You then need to find and move the messages into those folders. The good news is that once this is done on one computer, all of your various computers and devices will see those same folders as the folders synchronize to the other computers. The bold and dangerous method requires an extreme act of faith. You must delete all of the messages in the IMAP account which will also delete them on the server. You then drag all the messages from the POP account into the IMAP account. You do this one folder at a time. The messages will be uploaded to the server and eventually replicated to all of your other computers. Before you embark on the bold approach, you must check if you have any nested folders (folders inside other folders) in the POP account. Outlook supports this but not all IMAP servers support nested folders. To determine if Charter does, try making a nested folder in the IMAP account. If Charter does not support nested folders, you will get an error message.
The last part of the discussion turned to the difference between an email provider and an Internet service provider (ISP) and why they should not be the same. Since the Internet first became available to home users, ISPs have provided “free” email. They did this because it traps the customer. Once you give out that email address, changing it becomes a pain so you become a hostage to your ISP. The alternative is a “free-er” email address from Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail), AOL (or aim.com), and many others that you can keep “forever” even if you move to another continent. My favorites are Outlook.com and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). A free Yahoo email account provides only the most basic of services and is not recommended. The paid version ($20/year) eliminates the advertising and works with IMAP. Outlook.com is Microsoft’s upgrade to Live Mail and is intended to compete with Gmail. AIM is preferred over AOL because it is newer and thus you are more likely to find an email address you really like. Bon appétit!