Art Alexion on Mon, 22 Apr 2002 08:41:31 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] OT: Comparing POP3 and IMAP


I was thinking of replying the same way, but decided thay your topic was your topic. Paul is right, though. Actual speed -- which can be affected by many things other than your protocol -- is one of the least significant reasons to choose between POP and IMAP. Paul did a good job listing the more significant reasons. I'd recomment your paper focus on those reasons.

Paul wrote:



What is more important to a user, the actual time or the perception of time?

IMAP seams faster if, for the moment, you choose not to read every message that comes in. The message headers download very fast. Only the selected messages download completely. So, if you are on a slow link and don't want to download that message with a 5Meg attachment, you can skip or delete it quickly. If you want to run through all messages quickly, then POP seams faster.

So, the actual time is not really a concern for me. The perceived time is, dependent on my reading style. There are more important features of IMAP which make it superior to POP. The ability to check mail from multiple computers without having local mailboxes getting out of sync. The benefit of not losing mail if the client computer crashes since the mail is kept on the server which is also backed up. Maybe more secure.

From the server side, I think POP is better since the messages are removed from the server when they are viewed. But, actually, drive space is pretty cheap, so it might not matter.

Given a choice, I would always choose IMAP. As far as the actual statistics of sending and recieving, I don't know and it really doesn't matter to me.



Bradley Molnar wrote:

Hi all-

for a class project, I am supposed to compare pop3 and IMAP.  We are
supposed to compare anything we can find out about them.  I was planning on
comparing speeds of sending/retrieving e-mail and how long it takes, throw
in a bit of statistics, etc.

What I wanted to ask the group was this -- how would you go about comparing
the two protocals. Would you use a regular client and a stopwatch (which is
currently the fall-back plan), or, is there a mail client that can be
configured to use both pop3 and imap that has a self timing system.


thanks for your time and advice
-brad

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art alexion
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