--On 5 February 2010 15:20:46 +0000 John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Actually, we've seen a reasonable suggestion a few messages back that
would work equally well with POP and IMAP: extract a reporting address
from the message and send it an ARF report.
Which is certainly not at all simpler than setting an IMAP flag on a
message. And (if it's what the user desires) moving it out of the INBOX.
Can I ask people to stop making the newbie mistake of assuming that
all mail systems are, or should be, just like the mail system they
happen to use?
I'm not making that assumption. I'm simply claiming that the problem isn't
a single problem (1. "how to report junk messages"). It's two problems: "2.
how to report junk messages to an IMAP mailstore operator" and "3. how to
report junk messages to a POP mailstore operator".
I think that there's a simple, efficient, and elegant solution for 2
(IMAP), that isn't available for 3 (POP).
It may be that a simple, efficient, and elegant solution is available for
POP. After all, the DELE command uses a message-id argument, so it's
possible to flag specific messages as deleted, and therefore would not be
beyond the bounds of possibility to extend POP to permit flagging of junk
messages.
In both cases, it would not be necessary to download more than the message
headers in order to file a report. With ARF, you have to download the full
body if you hope to forward the report.
By solving both the problems with a one-size-fits-all proposal, we're
looking at a solution that strike me as pretty rubbish for both (especially
on a narrow-bandwidth connection).
I think IMAP is swell, I've used it for years, I've encouraged my
users to switch to it, but many of them won't. They're not just being
stubborn--they prefer to have their archive of mail in a place that
they control, or they're connected intermittently and it's faster to
download and delete with POP than do the equivalent in IMAP. The
tradeoffs in running a mail system for the students and staff at a
university, or for the employees of an equipment manufacturer, are not
the same as the ones at a consumer ISP or other kind of organization.
The world is not going to switch to 100% IMAP and it is just wasting
our time to pretend that it is.
R's,
John
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Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
01273-873148 x3148
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