>I've always been under the impression that Webmail was much more >server intensive than POP access. Is this not the case?
yes, of course. pop and smtp are very efficient, each process for a given session last only a few seconds. webmail users can hold open their webmail session for 10's of minutes, hours even, with KWM keep-alive tricks. each webmail process eats memory, and the webmail process is repeatedly scanning the .mbx file to read headers as the users pages back and forth through the list of messages, heavy disk i/o. Plus, webmail encourages the users to leave their mail on the disk rather than DL to the mail client, consuming much more diskspace than pop3 clients. The "business model" for free webmail: provide a free service that is much more expensive in system resources (quad xeon's, RAID5, 2 gb RAM, etc, etc) than traditional pop3, sell a few adds (or whatever), and has MUCH higher customer support costs: webmail hangs the machine, "my webmail can't mime encode and attach files", (note: pop clients encode/decode attachment on the PC, not on the mail server), "my webmail can't mime decode and display attachments", "my webmail can't delete msgs", "webmail ate my homework" The webmail emperor has no clothes. :)) You should give you client a DISCOUNT for using pop rather than webmail, not charge for it. Len http://MenAndMice.com/DNS-training http://BIND8NT.MEIway.com : ISC BIND 8.2.4 for NT4 & W2K http://IMGate.MEIway.com : Build free, hi-perf, anti-abuse mail gateways Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
