"The Great Debate" - POP vs IMAP (fork of Mail Problems)

[Scot Hacker]

On Oct 5, 2006, at 11:32 AM, Chad Leigh wrote:

>
> IMAP has no problem with 4GB of mail.  In fact, next year I plan on  
> launch an IMAP based mail service with 5GB or more of storage per  
> customer.

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that  IMAP itself couldn't  handle  
large mail stores -- I was making a point  about what *most hosts*  
allow. And only  raised  Goog as an example of a provider that offers  
a lot of online storage, and how  that still wouldn't be  enough for  
the *current needs* of some users. Your  5GB IMAP  service will be  
great, but  that isn't the norm, and I'm not in a position where I  
can offer  that kind of storage to my users.

On Oct 5, 2006, at 11:39 AM, David Zhou wrote:
> This is more of a IMAP client problem than anything with the  
> protocol.  It'd be very simple for an email client to have an  
> "archive all email of this account" command, and simply suck  
> everything from the IMAP account into an archive.

That feature would solve so much. It  amazes me that Mail.app doesn't  
already have  this built  in.

On Oct 5, 2006, at 11:47 AM, Google Kreme wrote:
> Oh, right, it's all marked as unread at home.
>
> Where is that message you sent last February?  On your home  
> machine, or on your work machine -- and oh crap, you got a new  
> computer at work in June, is that sent message on the new machine?

All true, all true. Last year  I set out to put all new users on  
IMAP, but backed away from that plan after  six  months.  "Normal  
users" aren't like you and  me. It just requires too much explanation  
and hand-holding to do en masse. Long phone conversations helping  
them to  understand what's  on the server  and what's  not, why  
they're  running up against  quota limits ("But that never happened  
with POP!," they complain), etc.

Maybe with tons of storage and  a large support staff it could work.

Scot

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