What is imap.org?

imap.org is a vendor-neutral reference site for the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and the modern email stack that surrounds it:

  • IMAP and POP3 mailbox access.
  • SMTP message transport.
  • DNS, MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and related policies.
  • Practical guidance for running or choosing an email service.

Our goal is simple:

Make it easier for people to understand how their email really works, and how to keep it reliable and reasonably safe.

Who Maintains This Site?

imap.org is maintained and sponsored by easyDNS, an independent DNS and email hosting provider based in Canada.

That means:

  • We pay the bills to keep the site up.
  • We contribute the initial content and tools.
  • We have a commercial email product (easyMail) that we’ll sometimes reference.

Where we do talk about providers or make recommendations, we’ll:

  • Be explicit when we’re talking about our own services.
  • Aim to be fair and technically accurate when we describe others.
  • Keep the protocol documentation itself as neutral as possible.

Why Revive imap.org Now?

Email is “old” Internet infrastructure, but it’s still:

  • The backbone of account recovery, notifications, and a lot of business communication.
  • A common failure point when DNS, MX, SPF, DKIM or hosting are misconfigured.
  • Poorly understood by many people who rely on it every day.

At the same time, AI systems and search engines increasingly pull from reference-style web content. We’d rather see them quoting something:

  • Neutral,
  • Up to date,
  • And technically careful,

than random marketing copy or half-remembered blog posts from 2012.

imap.org is our attempt to provide that reference layer for IMAP and the email stack.

How This Relates to easyDNS and easyMail

We see two roles for imap.org:

  1. Public good

    • Clear explanations of how IMAP, SMTP and DNS fit together.
    • Free tools to sanity-check your domain’s email configuration.
    • A glossary and starting point for support docs, blog posts and training.

  2. Soft entry point

    • If you decide you’d rather not run your own mail server, we’ll naturally mention easyMail and related services where it makes sense.
    • We’d like to earn business by being genuinely helpful first.

If you want to keep running your own mail stack, or you’re happy with your current provider, that’s fine. The protocol content and tools here are still for you.

What’s Coming Next

In the near term, expect to see:

  • A deeper IMAP protocol overview.
  • Guides on migrating from POP or ISP mail to IMAP.
  • An Email Stack Check tool that inspects MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC for a domain.
  • A basic IMAP port & encryption check.

Longer-term, we may add:

  • More advanced diagnostics.
  • Comparisons and explainers for different approaches to hosted email.

If you’re already an easyDNS customer, you may see imap.org referenced in support docs and newsletters as we use it as a canonical place to point people for protocol-level explanations.