On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 11:37:53AM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > On Friday, March 3 at 10:59 AM, quoth Derek Martin: > Well, there is the issue of single-instance-store. A message in a > shared folder only has to be stored on disk once, where a message > delivered by mailing list has to be stored as many times as there are > recipients. Right. As I said, ignoring that... I already covered the disk space angle -- disk space is cheap, and they already need a boatload of it. Also many people use Exchange, which only stores messages once regardless of how many recipients there are for the message. I myself use Exchange (IMAP) -> fetchmail -> procmail -> mutt at work. As I already said, I consider this a non-issue, and depending on your implementation, it my in fact be completely a non-issue. > > > - You never have to worry that one user accidentally deletes a > > message before everyone else has had a chance to see it. > > This can be accomplished by simply disallowing deletes from the shared > mailbox. But this forces you to keep messages hanging around, just because someone MIGHT want to see it. Hence mailboxes with 50,000 messages. If we DID care about disk space, this certainly isn't helping... I'd guess it at least balances out your message-per-recipient storage issue. It also means I will have to look through 50,000 messages I don't care about to find the one I do care about. Limits might work, but depending on the nature of the e-mail, they might not. I have several folders that receive over a hundred messages a day where the sender, recipient, and subject lines of each message are identical or nearly identical. I would need to do a full body search to find what I'm looking for (these are mostly automated problem reports of various kinds). Not good, especially in a mailbox with 50,000 messages. > > - If a particular user doesn't need to see mail on a particular > > list, they can just unsubscribe from it. > > User doesn’t need to check a mailbox he doesn’t want to read. True enough. But if it's a mailing list instead of a shared folder, it gives the individual a lot more flexibility to filter the mail into multiple subfolders any way they want to, including keeping a subset of the messages and discarding the rest. With shared folders, this can only be done by copying messages manually, and you still have to look through the whole folder to find the ones you care about. Limits can help here... It can work, but I don't see how you could argue that mailing lists aren't better. > > - If a particular user doesn't need to see mail on a particular list > > TODAY, they can just delete it all to get it out of their way > > without affecting everyone else. > > Hmm, this seems like an organizational issue. > macro index \ct "<limit>~r `date +%d/%m/%y`<enter>" I don't use macros -- while I think it's a great feature to have, I really don't think people should need to program their mail client to get the functionality they want. So to be honest I'm not sure exactly what this does, as some of the syntax is unfamiliar. But looking at it, I don't think it really addresses my point, either. So I'll elucidate. Say you have a mailing list that needs to be monitored by the group. Responsibility rotates on a daily basis. I want to keep all the mails for which I was responsible for responding for the last week (or month or whatever). I want to delete mails on days I'm not responsible for monitoring. I think you'd be hard-pressed to write a limit which will accomplish that... But if I get my own personal copy of the messages, I can save or delete them as I see fit. > > - Users can organize their mail into folders using methods that make > > the most sense for they way they work individually, rather than > > being forced to live with the group-defined organization. > > I would imagine <copy-message> can be used to the same effect. I would imagine that would really suck... I must have two copies of the message to get what I want, and I have to maintain a bunch of personal folders on top of all the shared folders. Yucky. And worst of all, I receive anywhere from 500 - 1500 messages a day (I kid you not). I manage 15,000 servers in several hundred datacenters at several hundred different ISPs all over the world (I am still not kidding)... I don't have time to be messing with copying messages into appropriate folders -- I want them to automatically be filtered into the folder that I need them in. If your lists are all relatively low volume, this is easier to deal with, but then also your disk space management benefit is even less of an issue... > > - If a user DOES accidentally delete a mail, there should be plenty > > of other people who have a copy of it, and can forward the message > > to the user who goofed. > > Again, don’t let people delete mail from the shared folder. Again, yucky. > > > - You don't have the problem of having 50,000 messages lying around > > that no one cares about, just because someone MIGHT care about > > them (but probably won't). > > Delete messages older than X days, tell people to make copies of > messages they wish to keep as reference. More folders, more management (i.e. more time on my part), more opportunities to get confused and lose mail you meant to keep. Yucky. > >Except for the space issue, which should be a non-issue if you're an > >ISP (cuz you need lots of space for storing user mail anyway), I > >can't see a single benefit to sharing folders. I'm curious if you > >have found any. > > I imagine it could be used as an efficient and handy reference for > things like “the last month worth of filtered daily log files” or > something like that. Sure, you could use that as an archive. And that seems like the only sensible way to use shared folders to me, and there are (IMO) better solutions, like web archives. > (plus you don’t have to implement all the fancy searching and > filtering for the webserver that people may want for viewing because > such things already in most mail readers). There are already plenty of software packages for maintaining and searching mailing list archives... no implementation necessary. > Another idea might be to use a shared folder as a sort of group to-do > list where the things that need to be accomplished are posted and then > deleted when they’re done. Could be, but there are also better solutions for this too. There are any number of groupware apps that do this, and there's probably plenty of web-based to-do list apps that you can download for free, if that's all you need. I never said you couldn't use shared IMAP folders and make it work... but you haven't really shown any cases where there is an advantage to doing so, I don't think. You've only provided some work-arounds for some of the issues I brought up, and I don't really see that any of them were in any way better than just using mailing lists instead. As far as I can see, every problem that can be solved with shared IMAP folders can be more flexibly or optimally solved with mailing lists or some other similar technology. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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