On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 10:58:06AM -0500, Gopi Sundaram wrote:
> On 21 Mar 2001, Mark Delany wrote (quoting me):
>
> > > Thus a user can check their email via IMAP or (shudder) POP from
> >
> > Why shudder? POP is by far the most reliable service of the two
> > and much simpler and supported by more clients.
>
> http://www.imap.org/papers/imap.vs.pop.brief.html
Right. My question remains. Why "shudder"? This article is 6 years old
and written by an IMAP proponent. Here's a couple of observations:
POP has turned out not be used mainly for "offline" mail processing.
The "offline vs online" model is largely dead these days.
Terry summarizes with: "its (IMAPs) additional complexity over POP
should not be a significant barrier to use."
I can't see how you shudder at POP on that basis. I agree that IMAP is
functionally richer, but that's about the only thing going for it.
> > Remember, if the mailboxes are in Maildir format, they can safely
> > be shared across NFS. A simple configuration might be:
>
> I'm reluctant to move to Maildir until we can get more MUAs to support
> them (specifically Pine and Netscape).
Are you talking about people who log into a shell or access via POP
and IMAP? If the latter, Maildir is transparent. If the former, you
never mentioned this, rather critical point.
> I've heard that the maildir format may have scalability issues because
> of the number of files that it deals with (bunches of open(), read()
> and stat() calls). Is there any truth to this?
This is tiresome FUD.
I can create a scenario that makes mbox look bad just as easily as a
scenario that makes Maildir look bad. Consider whether the FUD applies
to your scenario, not some imagined one created by a marketeer (and
yes geeks are just as guilty of marketing with FUD as the more
traditional salesdroid).
Regards.
