Gee, after reading all these negative comments, I have to disagree with you all. I've been using IMAP for a couple of years now and it is so much better than POP3. You see, I leave all the mail on the server (yes, did that with POP3, too) and I also use a 33.6 dialup connection from home. With POP3, it would take a good chunk of an hour before I could even begin reading my email (couple thousand messages in the mailboxes) and with IMAP, it takes just a couple of minutes at most! Yes, there is a slight delay when selecting each message and it gets longer when there is an attachment, but since I can tell how big each message is, I know which ones will take longer. I figure the time I saved at startup more than outweighs the time it takes to actually download any and all the messages with POP3. And I often finish reading/sending email in MUCH less time than it takes to finish the POP3 initial download.
I don't have any numbers, but my feeling is that the bandwidth used by each is probably much the same for the same set of messages. I'm betting it is much less via IMAP (does not have that big upfront download), if you don't actually read all the new messages (you can just delete the spam messages without actually downloading them, which saves even more b/w!). If you have no need for keeping messages on the server (like needing them regardless of where you are), and there are only a small number of messages each time you access the mailbox, only then would I recommend POP3 over IMAP. Daniel Donnelly ----- Original Message ----- From: "MARTIN PIGG" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 7:47 PM Subject: [IMail Forum] Slow 56k Links Good afternoon, We are planning an Imail Install and were hoping to get as many of our users as possible using IMAP. For the local users (that is, they are on the same LAN as the mail server) the testing went well, as we expected it would. We setup Outlook to use IMAP and the performance was just fine. We have a number of remote sites that only have 56K circuits. Some are in rural Alaska and bandwidth upgrades aren't really an option for many of these folks for budgetary reasons. Currently their Outlook clients are setup to use POP3 and they download their email from the soon to be retired mail server. Last week my supervisor and I tested remote mail and the results weren't pretty. Outlook (configured to use IMAP) would hang when an email message with a large attachment was accessed. We could use KillerWebMail and open the attachment. Has anyone had much luck using Outlook over slow circuits in an IMAP config? I suspect we may have to use POP3 for these locations, or possibly KillerWebMail. I guess I am also wondering if a 128k or 256k circuit might be able to handle an Outlook/IMAP config... Thanks in advance for any input you may have. Marty P. To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
