Re: what is the benefit of imap?

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wednesday, March 18 at 09:01 PM, quoth Jan-Herbert Damm:
> imap-issues are being discussed on this list quite frequently. i 
> wonder what the benefit of imap generally is?

The same as any network-accessible system: access.

Here's a comparable question: what's the benefit of having your travel 
itineraries available on travel websites (like expedia or 
travelocity)? For whatever bizarre reason, people use those services a 
lot, rather than printing their itineraries or saving them to local 
disk. The benefit is that you can get to them from anywhere.

I was at a hotel recently on business travel. My laptop's wireless 
connection was frotzed (long story), so I was forced to use the 
computers provided by the hotel. These were locked-down Windows 
machines, with a minimal web browser, but it was enough to get into my 
webmail.

You might ask: why use IMAP when you have webmail? Well, I think the 
reason is pretty clear. While it's true that you do get the centrality 
and availability from webmail, it doesn't have the convenience that a 
real email client has (for example, I *love* composing email in vim - 
but I can't do that with webmail). But IMAP is the protocol that makes 
both things possible: most webmail applications are centered on IMAP, 
and IMAP makes it possible for me to sue my own client when I can.

> if you have access to broadband flatrate internet (as many people in 
> agglomerations here in germany do) i can't think of the benefit of 
> managing my mails on a remote server.

IMAP is more likely to be let through a strict hotel firewall than SSH 
is.

Of course, you can host your own IMAP server on your home computer, 
just as you host your own SSH server.

There is also something to be said for reliability. My home machine 
sometimes loses power, or the neighborhood broadband goes out for a 
half an hour JUST BECAUSE (that's what I get for living in a monopoly: 
damn you Time-Warner!!! (note: their competitors are no better)). But 
just in general, the connectivity of my home machine *cannot* match 
the connectivity of my colocated system, which has two different 
routes to the internet.

I have a battery backup here in my apartment, but it only lasts a few 
minutes, and doesn't keep the internet up. My hosting provider has a 
permanent diesel generator hooked into their electric system. As an 
example, they recently survived an ice storm that caused power to go 
out for a *week*, but the generator that kept my server happy the 
whole time (even the air conditioning was powered by the generator). 
Yes, I could set up something similar for my apartment, but not for 
anywhere near a reasonable amount of money.

My desktop machine has a cheapie IDE hard drive. I have regular 
backups (onto more, external cheapie IDE drives), but if lightning 
hits... I'm pretty much screwed. My colocated server has 
enterprise-class SCSI hard drives with offsite backups. There's no way 
that I could justify doing that for my desktop computer, not for a 
reasonable amount of money.

And the beauty of it is that this server of mine allows me to provide  
the same level of service to my entire family. But there's no way I'd 
insist that they learn ssh or the command line just to get access. No, 
IMAP allows me to provide that service in a way that they can 
understand, that's convenient, and that's fast.

Did I mention fast? It takes much less than a second to read my email. 
Granted, mutt caches most of it, but that's fine: it's optimizing for 
the common case.

Gosh, I guess I'm thinking: there's no reason NOT to use 
IMAP---especially if you have lots of bandwidth at your disposal.

Does that answer your question?

~Kyle
- -- 
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that 
we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only 
unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American 
public.
                                            -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Thank you for using encryption!

iEYEARECAAYFAknBY+8ACgkQBkIOoMqOI164jwCgrCHUyfFkDMW+Cu8Q1K8S0LW7
ZnsAn3bf1BcZiPC96C0oCcrU3OcHejy2
=hHBo
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----