| William H. Magill on Fri, 20 Jun 2003 12:17:05 -0400 |
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On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 04:48 PM, Martin DiViaio wrote: I've finally learned what IMAP is today, I never bothered looking into it because I thought that it was just an equivelent alternative to POP3. After finding out what it is, it sounds great, because I can access my inbox from anywhere and I dont have to rely on this stupid yahoo web mail anymore. My question is, why do I never hear of anybody using it. All of the webhosts out there offer "POP3 email accounts" but no IMAP. ISP's I *think* are the same, but I pay less attention to those, even yahoo has a POP3 email service, but I never see IMAP offered anywhere, why is this? There is also a second issue about IMAP and "security" which is normally overlooked. With IMAP, the mail is designed to sit on the server someplace. With POP, the mail is designed to be downloaded to the desktop machine. If you run the server, then the two are not particularly different. And from a business "process" point of view, IMAP is preferable because of the central backup concept. But if you are using somebody else's server, then YOUR mail is sitting on their machine available to anybody who happens to crack into that server... and to any entity who happens to decide that the ISP (or whoever runs the server) deserves to be sued. Remember, the thing which brought Oliver North down was the fact that even though he erased his mail locally, it continued to exist on the server's archival backups. Running an IMAP server today can be more than slightly problematic. Disk storage is a serious problem. Electronic Mail messages have grown dramatically in size over the years. While the issues of attachment size depend upon the corporate environment, the days of the 1920 Character text message are gone. (1920 = 80 characters per line 24 lines per screen). It is pretty normal for any kind of commercial communication to be in the 1-2 meg range because of included/attached PDFs, Spread Sheets, Word Documents and the like. For a POP server, this issue is not as severe because 99+% of the users never heard of the "Leave mail on server" option. So someone might get one or two of these large messages a day, and not impact the overall storage requirements ... until they go on vacation. But with IMAP, again, 99+% of the users never move the mail from the central server to the local machine because that defeats the intended purpose of IMAP, (access from multiple locations). This means that person getting 5 one-meg messages a week, suddenly is eating up 5 meg worth of storage per week! Multiply that by the number of users a typical ISP supports and you can start to get big numbers quickly. Then you start to implement quotas and or charge for more storage... Put another way, compared to POP, IMAP can be an administrative nightmare for large servers. Many ISPs actually do offer both services, they just don't bother to advertise IMAP. [And don't forget, Yahoo's Web Mail works by making copies of your email messages and storing them on THEIR server. Putting your messages in yet another location subject to cracking and subpoena.] T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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