On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Richard Bang wrote:
> I will exclude Pine from my discussion because, while it is much liked
> by Marc, I have never heard of a single commercial user using it and
^^^^ Mark
> none of the customers I have ever asked have heard of it. Given that
> many of us work in the constraints of the commercial world, Pine is just
> not there.
Well, your customers may not have heard of Pine, but somewhere around 18
million individuals around the world have.
Given the repeated security problems of certain popular "commercial world"
clients, I would ban their use if I were the IS manager. Pine does not
spread SWEN or Sobig.F...
> The IMAP
> server I have under RH doesn't permit concurrent connections or nested
> folders so while all the above are fine with flat folder, single
> connection servers I suspect that the writers were simply unable to test
> against servers that has the full feature set available.
That certainly isn't my experience; most GUI clients insist upon "dual use
mailboxes" and multiple connections to the same mailbox.
> Its hard to believe that IMAP4 was approved in 1994 and we are still, 10
> years later, in a situation that the clients and server writers cannot
> produce a single consistent set of results and answers to the question
> "What is a good imap client" gets the answer "Pine"!
Indeed, it is hard to believe.
Many client implementors seem to approach IMAP as something to be fought
and subdued. IMAP has many powerful capabilities which a client can
exploit, but (for whatever reason) these capabilities are seen as
surplusage, irritants, or even something to overcome. The delete-expunge
model and the unsolicited data model are prime examples of this.
Pine isn't the only client which seeks to ride the beast rather than beat
it into submission. But beating into submission seems to be the more
common approach.
This perhaps should be a lesson for future protocol architects; don't make
the server do things that client implementors may see as being within
their domain of control.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
