No IMAP?

socal · 1st February 2004

I've been using Calypso/Courier for many years. Certainly one of the best email clients available. Recently I did quite a bit of research on options for upgrading my email service. Mailsnare.net
is the service I decided to go with. It is an excellent value for what they have to offer. I purchased my own domain name (godaddy.com) and got everything set up on the server. However when I began configuring Courier; I was very disappointed to discover that IMAP is not fully supported! I hope that Rose Software will fully implement this with the next version. Until then I'll have to find a temporary alternative. IMAP is far superior to POP, especially if you access your email from different computers.

This link has more info/providers reviews: http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/#whyIMAP

IMAP statistics: http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/...&threadid=3665

eric531 · 2nd February 2004

We are planning on fleshing out the IMAP support, although this probably will not be in 4.0 but perhaps one of the subsequent point upgrades.

If you have a link to any statistics as to the relative number of IMAP users vs. POP users I'd be interested to see them - I suspect that IMAP is a very small share. While I agree there are certainly some advantages to IMAP, I'm not sure that most users want/need/are willing to pay for them.

For instance, my mailbox file is 85MB. I don't know how much it would cost me to maintain an IMAP account with 100 MB storage, but I'm sure it would be more than a 10MB POP account. There is also a trend towards more people using laptops as their primary PC (I do this), and with wi-fi becoming ubiquitous laptops will become the defacto method for people needing to access their mail from more than one place.

Courier also has the unique structure where all settings, messages, accounts and addresses are contained in a single file, so you could keep your mailbox on a USB flash drive and just plug it into another computer. Now Courier would have to be installed there too, so it would be suitable for a work -> home -> work solution, but not say using your mailbox at a public computer.

So all of this is by way of saying that while full IMAP suport is something we are working towards, it is behind some other priorities that we want to fold into the next version.

skrivis · 9th February 2004

Hmmm....

Accessing your mail from home and work via IMAP sounds better than using a USB flash device to carry your mailboxes back and forth. Less expensive too.

Let's say I have 10 users with 100 MB of mail. That's a GB on the server and that costs maybe $1. (Sound about right?)

How much will it cost to buy 10 USB "drives" with 100+MB storage each?

Laptops definitely are replacing desktop machines in many areas. But it becomes difficult to ensure that the data is protected. Drop your laptop and there goes all your e-mail. Yep, some places use backup solutions that allow for laptops, but a lot of places simply tell you to store your data on the server. (Desktop or laptop.) (The increasing size of hard drives mean that backups become less possible anyway. There simply isn't a large enough time window to do it.)

Trash your client machine? No problem, you get a new one with a standard software load (or they reload your machine if the hardware is ok) and your login then gives you access to your stored settings and files.

Some places hardly even try to troubleshoot software problems. They just reload with the standard image.

I don't see that local storage is the way things are going.

It's really nice that Courier Email allows you to keep your mail on a USB device, but I see it as an extra instead of a normal mode of operation.

skrivis · 9th February 2004

http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/ may be a good place to start to get a feel for how widespread IMAP is. I'm not sure if she's got any stats on usage though.

Mark Crispin might have something on this.

UW also has a site www.imap.org that could be a place to start looking. CMU is also very into IMAP, so http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/ is a good site.

Webmail systems tend to rely on IMAP, so you could argue that those users use IMAP.