Re: what is the benefit of imap?
On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 10:23:30AM +0100, Stephan Seitz wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 09:06:14AM +0000, Chris G wrote:
>> Are they on your LAN? Using IMAP across the internet (even with a
>> good ADSL connection) can never really be as quick as a local mbox
>> spool, especially if you're dealing with attachments and such. Think
>> about it - a 1Mbyte attachment is going to take some seconds to pull
>> across even a 2 or 3Mb/s ADSL link whereas it's going to be near
>> instantanous from a local file.
>
> Sorry, but I think, here you are wrong. Good IMAP-Clients don’t download
> the attachments without your interaction (at least you can configure them
> in such a way). So the reading of the mails should be fast in both ways.
> But if you wish to open an attachment, IMAP is better than using SSH and
> local spool.
Is there a way to view the body of an imap message without mutt actually
fetching (not saving) all attachments? Fetching a 5-10mb attachment
just to view the body text is a significant annoyance when I'm away from
my local work LAN. I'd like to be able to view the body text and have
mutt fetch the attachments only when I hit "v" -> "return" to view the
attachment.
> With IMAP you only download the attachment, and then the
> local application will deal with it. With SSH and local spool you must
> start the application remote.
>