Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
At 11:36 PM -0700 5/29/03, Dave Crocker wrote:
The POP->IMAP example is excellent, since it really demonstrates my
point. IMAP is rather popular in some local area network environments.
However it's long history has failed utterly to seriously displace POP
on a global scale.
Exactly right. The benefits of IMAP are obvious to everyone who has
looked at it in any depth, and yet it is very thinly deployed. The main
reason: the perceived additional administrative overhead.
I think what this shows is that client and server implementations still
do a lousy job with IMAP. In particular, the few IMAP implementations
I'm familiar with don't do a very good job of online/offline separation.
In one case, you have to modify the properties of each folder, and it
doesn't indicate whether or not a message is downloaded.
Also, since most consumers don't use procmail, there's probably not much
of a direct benefit to them -- yet.
Eliot