> On Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 10:54 AM, Jeff Koch wrote: >> It seems that the qmail, vpopmail, qmailadmin people tend to recommend >> squirrelmail and sqwebmail. However, these are both imap clients. Our >> initial reaction is to prefer (in order to save bandwidth, cpu cycles >> and disk space) pop3 and have users keep their mail folders on their >> local PC's. Why do you all like the imap web email clients? Are there >> any pop3 only web email clients that you guys would recommend? > > I think people like the webmail clients because the protocol allows for > more flexibility. There's nothing gained by switching to POP3 for a > webmail client -- you still need to keep the user's email on your > server. The web browser won't download and store the email on their PC. > > Getting your users to use a POP3 email client like Outlook Express or > Eudora would reduce bandwidth and CPU cycles as the server would > transmit only the email messages (without HTML overhead and message > manipulation) to the end-user, and would typically only do it once. > > Some users don't have a single, local PC to store their email on, and > prefer to use IMAP so they can access their email from multiple > machines, and even have access to old email via a web browser when away > from their PC.
Well put Tom, agreed on all points. I'd like to add uniform backup capabilities to this list as well. With IMAP, I can advertise to my clients that I provide regular backups of all their mail and subsequently charge them for this service (though I don't actually charge for it, hypothetically I could). I tell them things like "you'll never have to worry about losing mail because its all stored on the server and backed up at regular intervals". Plus the power users (like myself) want the flexibility it offers. I like being anywhere in the world (including home, using my primary pc) with access to all of my messages. Regards, -- Dave Steinberg http://www.geekisp.com
