C. A. Niemiec sez: >So my question: Is IMAP ever _fast_?
IMAP is just as fast as POP. However, the sequence for things is different, so it APPEARS slower to us. With POP, unless you've set some weird pref somewhere, it downloads all of your email at once. So, when you click on an email, you see it -- POOF. With IMAP, only the headers of an email are downloaded and shown in a list. Then, when you click, it downloads the message, so there is a brief pause while it does this. The faster your internet connection (the better the server, etc.) determines how "slow" this feels to you. I like the idea of IMAP because everything stays on the server. Ostensibly it could be set up so that spam and viruses and such never get to your computer. When you see a header in the list that made it past your IMAP server-based spam checkers, you delete it and POOF it's gone before it ever downloads to your system. I like that. However, as a system admin, I never could convince anyone that the protection it afforded (along with the organizational abilities and other pluses if you worked from multiple workstations in multiple environments) trumped having to wait an extra .05-2 seconds for the email to pop up for reading. (And caching and other techniques available these days could probably even fix that.) Also, I never could convince people it was a good thing to archive old mail in other local folders to free space on the IMAP server when their quota was reached. "But I want it all! I might have to look up that letter from 1995!" Well, some people may, but, trust me, those I was dealing with did not. :) POP has several features one can enable to emulate what IMAP does: leave mail on server, partial downloading, etc., but in my experience it has never been exactly what IMAP is. Do I use IMAP? With my .Mac account I do, but I usually connect to it via web browser and not through Powermail anyway. Otherwise, the nature of the work I do now is serviced well enough by POP accounts. But I wouldn't hesitate to set up an IMAP server if I felt it was best for an organization... -- Michael Lewis Off Balance Productions 240-271-9889 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.offbalance.com
