1. remote mail folder access server IMAP (the Interactive Mail Access Protocol) is a mechanism for accessing mail folders and the messages in them remotely, ie with your user mail program running on a different machine to the one where all the messages are stored. If you do install uw-imapd you will almost certainly want to install a Mail Transfer Agent such as Smail or Sendmail, as remote mail programs which use IMAP to access incoming and saved mail will usually want to send mail using SMTP, often to the same machine. From Debian 3.0r0 APT