On Tuesday 05 June 2001 11:41, you wrote:
> Paul M Foster wrote:
> Yes but No - POP is a very onomotopaeic protocol. It "pops" the mail
> right off the server and onto the workstation that is running your email
> client. You can use the "leave mail on server" option that most POP
> clients have, which will leave the mail message in your INBOX on the
> server as well as make a local copy, but that only helps in that you
> still have the email in your INBOX.
>
> The big problem that IMAP solves is that POP only deals with local mail
> folders - not mail folders stored on the server. (A "Mail Folder" is
> usually an mbox file in most cases.) IMAP is almost a remote file
> management protocol that's tailored to working with mbox files, as much
> as it is any kind of EMail protocol. You can move messages from one
> remote folder to another, move messages between local and remote
> folders, you can delete folders, create new folders, make subfolders
> (subdirectories) with "nested" mail folders in them, and so on. POP is
> only really good for retrieving mail from your INBOX to your local
> machine.
>
> I have almost 700MB of mail on my server - I never delete _anything_
> except SPAM - in almost 500 folders, spanning a good 4 or 5 years. That
> stuff ABSOLUTELY HAS to stay on my email server. I can't POP it to a
> local box and manage it from there, because a) then I couldn't get to it
> from a different machine since it wouldn't be on the server anymore, b)
> I wouldn't be able to manage the 500 folders of email with POP so I'd
> have about eighteen billion messages in my INBOX, and c) I'd then have
> 700MB of mail sitting on my local machine instead of on my server where
> I've made room for it and where I can manage it.
>
> Which is why I'm baffled as to why so few mail clients support IMAP, and
> not incidentally, why so few people are familiar with IMAP. I
> understand why a lot of people use POP, because ISPs don't want to get
> stuck with managing gigabytes of their users' mail on their mail servers
> if everyone used IMAP, but for people who have their own servers, or use
> company servers, IMAP makes so much more sense than POP. Or maybe I'm
> just weird in that I don't delete everything as soon as I've read it and
> nobody else needs anything but POP because they immediately delete
> everything and just don't need to manage remote folders. Or maybe I'm
> weird because I actually read my email from three or four different
> machines depending on where I am and what machine I have available at
> the time. Or maybe I'm just weird...
Probably both ; )
Seriously though. Historically one would never read mail from several places
and so on. IMAP got a lot of use though web interfaces. It required more
intelligence than pop (new and different) and did not really get to popular
with ISPs for the reason you said. Why should we hold on to all these peoples
mail when we are not making much money in the first place. ($20 Was right for
the consumer but not the ISP.)
Harddrive space was much more costly than now, and realize that one only used
SCSI drives (as they allow multiple access simultaniously).
As competition (from serious ISPs, read business people) got tougher and
storage prices kept crawling down, storage became less and less an issue.
The new standard IMAP 2000 f.ex. has some great security features. But seems
much more of an headache so you tend to not wanting to fix what is not broke.
It would be interesting to see how many people actually use mail like you
(and me).
As far as keeping a record, well that's just plain crazy! (Don't say so, but
I do it too!) I like having an audit trail available. Maybe that many years
is not That useful. But hey, one could analyze it and who knows...
If you start keeping a record, when do you delete? (Probably when you need
the space and there just is no other solution available.
For some reason I've been dragging along almost all the floppies I ever made.
In case I needed something for reference or some such. (Minus the 5 1/4", I
left those in Africa when I was there.)
Actually today I was just considering throwing them away as 1). they are
probably no longer working, 2). what's on them is now severly out of date
(like how to get online (Internet) with DOS 3.3!) 3). I'm getting tired of
looking after these stupid boxes.
But that's just me!
Still crazy after all these years...
Steve,
(last time I checked : )
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