On Wed February 23 2005 00:20, Martin Duerst wrote:
This feature is about having mboxes containing all the mails
from a given period available, in application/mbox format.
I'm not sure that downloading an entire huge collection of
messages in one gigantic gulp is the best approach.
Some time ago, I gave a rough outline of how a collection
could be made accessible via IMAP, POP, and NNTP using
mostly off-the-shelf software -- but IIRC there were some
issues regarding getting the Archived-At field(s) into the
messages, which seems to be a chicken-vs.-egg problem.
From a consumer point of view, IMAP provides the richest
set of features, since it supports server-side searches,
etc. That in turn may reduce bandwidth requirements for
access, since messages of interest can be selected for
transfer (as opposed to copying thousands of messages in
order to gain access to one message of interest).