Out of Topic: IMAP

[Richard Frovarp]

Roger Jochem wrote:
> Since almost everyone here nows a lot about e-mail, server 
> configuration, and that kind of stuff, I was wondering: how many of 
> you use IMAP instead of POP3 for mail access?
>
> I allways used POP3 on my server, and reading about IMAP shows me a 
> lot of advantages... A problem would be the server disk size, but 
> since disks are not so expansive nowadays, I'm considering changing 
> the protocol when I upgrade my server.
>
> Any ideas or sugestions about it? Any of you that already had an 
> experience with this could give me some tips, some impressions about it?
>
> Regards
>
> Roger Jochem

IMAP MAY use more disk space. This is due to the fact that both 
protocols can download and delete message, or leave messages on the 
server, just their defaults are opposite. I've always configured my POP3 
clients to leave the messages on the server, as I usually want to access 
them from multiple locations. In that scenario, POP3 is actually going 
to use more network and disk resources (reads) than IMAP, since the 
client will waste time downloading messages I won't be reading. I'm 
guessing most people don't do this. However, if your setup instructions 
tell the user to check that little box, then that is a different story. 
With people checking email from work and home, this may be more common.

We run IMAP and use mbx format. There are occasional issues when the 
index is corrupted, but there are tools to fix it. Using mbx over 
maildir prevents the system from having to read n files for the required 
information, where n is the number of messages in the folder. As you 
might expect n can grow to be quite large.