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Re: Deployment cases

2008-01-01 15:22:33
On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 12:46:08PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
In other words, I believe IMAP gets used as a MAPI surrogate, but not as a 
general-purpose means of accessing mailboxes supplied by consumer-oriented 
service providers.

Those providers usually make IMAP available, but my sense is that it is not 
used all that much.  POP seems to remain vastly preferred.

I don't think that's true.  A lot of people want to be able to access
their mail stores from multiple clients, and POP doesn't do that well
at all.  MS Outlook and Outlook express both support IMAP, and you get
more functionality if you use IMAP.  Google's Gmail didn't support
IMAP at first, and quite a large number of people complained about
that.

My favorite trick is to use the "isync" program
(http://isync.sourceforge.net) to synchronize an IMAP store with a
local Maildir directory on my laptop.  I can then read and delete my
e-mail on the laptop while disconnected from the network, and then at
the end of the airplane trip, when I gain access to the network, I can
synchronize my local Maildir store with the IMAP server store; e-mails
which I deleted on my local machine are deleted on the IMAP server,
and new e-mails that have since arrived get downloaded to my laptop.
This is also great in Europe where the local wireless ISP's appear to
be run by Ferengi, since I can minimize the number of minutes I need
to be connected to the network.  And, if anything ever happens to my
laptop, I have a backup copy of my e-mail on the IMAP server, which is
not usually the case with POP.  (POP is vastly more inefficient if you
leave e-mails on the server, since the protocol really isn't designed
for that.)

Basically, the combination of isync and mutt as a MUA gives me all of
the advantages of Lotus Notes' disconnected operation, except it's
faster, uses 10 times less memory, has decent search capabilities, and
has reasonable threading support.  :-)

                                                - Ted

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