On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 15:04, Jonathan Nichols wrote:
> Greetings, y'all,
> I'm asking you folks because a lot of you seem to have decent
> experience with mail & stuff. ;)
>
> 1)POP or IMAP? Do you require users to use one or the other? If so, why?
> I am trying to migrate users to IMAP but have run into resistance from
> our new manager, who doesn't have any valid technical reasoning for
> keeping people on POP.
IMAP if the server has capacity (disk and CPU and a fat local pipe) and
is being backed up, otherwise POP.
> 2)Backups? What are you using for backups, and what exactly gets backed up?
>
> My dilemna is that our new manager seems to be contradicting himself and
> saying that "we have to give the users the tools they need to do their
> jobs" but saying "users can only have 1gb on the file server to back up
> data, and they have to do it themselves."
I can see the space limitations, but your manager is nixing backing up
the **server**???!!! Or does he mean the individual users have to copy
important things to the server so that they'll be backed up? The latter
is reasonable.
> I'm confused, because my goal is to try to prevent people from losing
> data. POP = mail on local disk. Disk dies, mail is lost.
Or POP = mail in personal email folders on the file server. That's how
we do it, and the only way I'd recommend using POP.
Your users may need some guidelines and training in how to manage their
mailboxes and how to keep only relevant emails. {grumbles about 500MB
"deleted messages" folder}
> IMAP = mail on
> server. Disk dies, user doesn't lose 3 years worth of mail.
> Backups? Am I supposed to let the secretary back up her own Outlook .pst
> files? (Only a handful of people here use Outlook.) What about the Mac
> users? Are they just out of luck?
Mail should be stored on a server and backed up regularly.
Whether it's the mail server, and you access it via IMAP, or a home-dirs
file server, and you access the mail via POP and save it in a mail
folder stored in your home dir on the file server, is a design decision
for you. Leaving the mail on the mail server and accessing it via IMAP
simplifies SA admin a bit - each user can have spamassassin mail folders
that sa-learn can easily read, for example.
--
John Hardin KA7OHZ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Internal Systems Administrator voice: (425) 672-1304
Apropos Retail Management Systems, Inc. fax: (425) 672-0192
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36 days until Apropos Forum 2004
