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Re: what is the benefit of imap? Another meta-question.



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On Thursday, March 19 at 10:42 AM, quoth David Champion:
> I think the best summary is that IMAP is a remote mailbox access 
> protocol, supporting all common mailbox operations at the protocol 
> level.  POP is not: it supports full message retrieval, new-message scan 
> (kind of, via UIDL), and deletion.  This makes it, at best, a queued 
> message pull protocol.

Well, if you're comparing IMAP to POP, one of the common comparisons 
between them is that POP's simplicity lends itself to much more simple 
and lightweight server implementations. Thus, these implementations 
are easy to audit, easy to secure, and require less hardware to 
support hundreds of thousands of users. IMAP makes operations like 
server-side sorting and arbitrary tagging available and that puts more 
work on the server. IMAP clients are likely to stay connected for 
hours at a time (rather than poll periodically), and have a habit of 
keeping multiple connections open, making it easy for a single IMAP 
server to run out of ports if its supporting a large number of 
clients. POP3 clients rarely use multiple connections, and poll 
periodically instead of keeping a connection open, and thus POP3 
servers are unlikely to run out of ports, but IMAP servers supporting 
large numbers of clients just might.

> Most of the things that people cite as flaws of POP are really flaws 
> in particular implementations, not in the protocol.  The POP 
> protocol is limited in scope, but I don't think this is a flaw; POP 
> just has a different design goal.

Well, that's fair. The "flaw" of POP are, as far as I'm concerned, 
that it doesn't do what I want it to do... which is provide for 
management of multiple mailboxes. Not it's fault, I suppose, but still 
a reason not to use it.

~Kyle
- -- 
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if 
you really make them think, they'll hate you.
                                                        -- Don Marquis
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