On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 12:46:08PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote: > In other words, I believe IMAP gets used as a MAPI surrogate, but not as a > general-purpose means of accessing mailboxes supplied by consumer-oriented > service providers. > > Those providers usually make IMAP available, but my sense is that it is not > used all that much. POP seems to remain vastly preferred. I don't think that's true. A lot of people want to be able to access their mail stores from multiple clients, and POP doesn't do that well at all. MS Outlook and Outlook express both support IMAP, and you get more functionality if you use IMAP. Google's Gmail didn't support IMAP at first, and quite a large number of people complained about that. My favorite trick is to use the "isync" program (http://isync.sourceforge.net) to synchronize an IMAP store with a local Maildir directory on my laptop. I can then read and delete my e-mail on the laptop while disconnected from the network, and then at the end of the airplane trip, when I gain access to the network, I can synchronize my local Maildir store with the IMAP server store; e-mails which I deleted on my local machine are deleted on the IMAP server, and new e-mails that have since arrived get downloaded to my laptop. This is also great in Europe where the local wireless ISP's appear to be run by Ferengi, since I can minimize the number of minutes I need to be connected to the network. And, if anything ever happens to my laptop, I have a backup copy of my e-mail on the IMAP server, which is not usually the case with POP. (POP is vastly more inefficient if you leave e-mails on the server, since the protocol really isn't designed for that.) Basically, the combination of isync and mutt as a MUA gives me all of the advantages of Lotus Notes' disconnected operation, except it's faster, uses 10 times less memory, has decent search capabilities, and has reasonable threading support. :-) - Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf