Re: what is the benefit of imap?
On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:34:18PM +0100, Rocco Rutte wrote:
> Hi,
>
> * Chris G wrote:
>
>> On
>> the other hand if you *don't* need to access mail from anywhere then
>> IMAP is slower than other ways of doing it and doesn't add any other
>> particular advantages.
>
> Depends. Most people using IMAP use it through IMAP providers which
> "guarantee" you 24/7 availability. You mostly have professional admins
> who do the work for you and ensure you have access to mail. With local
> management, that would be your job. For example, your harddisk with the
> mail spool dies and all mail is gone. That is rather unlikely to happen
> with say gmail.
>
There's absolutely nothing that prevents you using, for example,
fetchmail to get your mail from an IMAP server to a local repository
of some sort. You then have the security of the remote IMAP
management and the speed of local mail.
I suppose you could argue that this is what off-line IMAP does but, as
far as I know, there are *very* few good MUA implementations of
off-line IMAP.
--
Chris Green