And there is no savings if you use a webmail program, it will not delete users emails when he logs on to webmail :) this would be little stupid since he would lose all his emails when he close his browser :)
You can, if you wish use IMAP for webmail and just allow IMAP connections from localhost or wherever your webmail is. Thus you can give pop3 to your users happily and they can't use pop3.
IMAP clients use less memory and CPU because of the design of IMAP protocol. Thats why you should use it :) I was using this commercial product Mailman and it crashed the server few times, when a user was trying to open 8 jpg attachments. Yet I dont even see any load in my new webmail at all (squirrelmail) and the plugins rock!
About pop3, maybe you are not aware but users are able to keep their emails in ther mailboxes by just ticking dont delete from server option in their email client. Thus no savings done.
Now the irony is that pop3 does not support this, this is done in client side! Thus I am not sure if there is any way to request subject lines from an pop3 server without receiving the whole message actually.
And this definetely doesnt save any bandwidth. Plus its painful for the user too if they have slow connections. It is a lot more practical to use IMAP and just get the subjects and the user can delete all the spam etc. without the need of downloading the whole email.
Yet the hard drive prices are so low that I dont know if you would care at all. 1gbyte comes for $1 or less nowadays. Even if you give gbyte quota to each user, you only need to ask $1 more :) This is quite acceptable I think. :) If you have many users then you can use 2x 320gbyte disks for example in an ide raid array, backups would be painful though :) or use in mirroring so you dont have to take backups at all. (well this is not fail proof but yet better than nothing)
So IMAP beats POP3 in every way. And I am sure somebody invented some mail client which deletes the mails from server when they are fetched with IMAP too.
Evren
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?
Best Regards,
Jeff Koch
