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

[Chad Leigh]

On Oct 5, 2006, at 3:27 PM, Michael Brian Bentley wrote:

> 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.

Many modern IMAP servers do not store several thousand messages to a  
file.  Many newer ones today use maildir or other variant where each  
mail is a file.

Chad