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

[Michael Brian Bentley]

I'd get more excited by IMAP if where messages are kept weren't the 
only salient feature. There are many capabilities that email systems 
could provide, but mail package developers don't seem to be 
enthusiastically bellyflopping on any grenades for us.

Typical IMAP servers don't store the data in anything more 
sophisticated than files, several thousand messages to a file. IMAP 
access to individual messages is still pokey. Dataset operations over 
IMAP aren't much of an improvement over the same operations performed 
locally by POP clients.