On Jun 15, 2005, at 3:17 PM, Fluxstringer wrote:
The UA's main e-mail system is imap based, and that's serving some
30-40K accounts. Our mail server handles some 600 accounts, and
ALL our mail resides on a 140G raid. Right now /home is taking up
131G of that (which is 99% mail, since we don't have shell
accounts except for the admins on this machine), but we're moving
to a new mail server RSN.
I suspect that the KSU server is IMAP also. I will find out for
sure. Earthlink told me theirs is POP only. and courteously sent
an email explaining
aspects of IMAP of which i was not aware. Strange if they only
offer POP accounts.
That pushes the responsibility for mail store maintenance onto the
customer. Also, sheer inertia, and only one set of instructions to
push out from Bangalore.
You can maintain much smaller quotas with POP over IMAP; the main
reason Earthlink has changed to a 100 MB mail quota is because most
people use Webmail as a means of getting around the POP mail
limitations; primarily the 'can only access from one computer' deal.
(GMail hasn't hurt on the mail quota thing, either.)
POP is a truly outmoded protocol, really. Modern IMAP clients, like
OS X Mail, allow it to behave much like a POP mail account; you can
set it to download messages and attachments for offline use, or just
download as needed, which is really nice on a slow dialup link.
It was designed for a time when people had one computer, it sat on
their desk, and that was it. It predates the Web by quite a bit, and,
ironically was a means of getting around a limitation of e-mail at
the time: that you had to be online to telnet to your mail system or
be online for the mail system on your computer to work.
We've come full circle: people want to get their mail on their desktop
(s), on their laptop(s), on their cell phone, their PDA and at the
local internet Cafe. Thate pushes youn inexorably back to a network-
centric base for e-mail.
Anyone with more than one computer would be well served by using
imap. You don't need to be a high-pressure tightly wound world
traveler type. I'm not all THAT high pressure, and my traveling is
mainly the 3 1/2 miles between work and home.
Don't diss that which you don't know!
I don't think I was disrespectful of IMAP in my statements. Merely
pointing out that not everyone needs anything more than Eudora Lite..
You said only "high pressure, tightly wound, highly paid,professional
world traveler types" would use it. I kinda took it wrong. Sorry.
I don't remember the original poster saying he needed IMAP ability.
He mentioned that it only did POP as a problem. The only other major
mail service is IMAP, AFAIK.
Anyone I've ever met who got to use an imap server for a little
while really likes it. It's sort of like Windows versus the mac.
Most people have never used a Mac so they think it's 'just like
Windows only a little different', when in reality it's a world of
difference. None of that 'oh sh*t! my HDD just crashed, there
goes all my e-mail!'
I have four computers I use on a routine basis. Only imap lets me
access ALL my e-mail from any of them any time I want.
Does an IMAP account store user info on the server which coincides
with the email client used?
That would likely be LDAP, which is a different thing entirely, but
can integrate with an IMAP server to store user info, addresses, etc.
Netscape Server was building extensions of that, which would allow
someone using Netscape Communicator on several systems have one set
of address books, bookmarks, etc.
OS X mail lets you specify whether your Sent, Junk and Trash folders
are on the server or the local drive. I remember we tried getting
that to work but didn't succeed.
LDAP is like any number of Directory services, like Open Directory
(which is LDAP based) or Active Directory, etc, which can work with
IMAP, but aren't strictly speaking parts of the IMAP specification.
My KSU account also has shared calenders and groups.
That's different. The IMAP server may run in conjunction with those
services, but those are not part of IMAP. This gets complex when you
deal with things like MS Exchange. Exchange Mail is an MS-ified IMAP
mail server, tied in with the other groupware stuff.
But the mail client is online from iPlanet.
MOST webmail apps are imap clients in disguise. (Yep, even
Earthlink's...they just don't expose the IMAP functionality to the
users.)
--
Bruce Johnson
This is the sig who says 'Ni!'
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