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From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: Re: Desktop Mail in the University Environment
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.175443.7553@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 11 Feb 91 17:54:43 GMT
References: <3348@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <1991Feb10.022029.105@parc.xerox.com>
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Organization: University of Illinois at U-C
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In article <1991Feb10.022029.105@parc.xerox.com> sanders@parc.xerox.com (Rex Sanders) writes:
>With Eudora, you can leave ALL your old
>unsorted mail piling up forever on the POP host.  You will soon be
>visited by a system administrator threatening bodily harm!
>If your old mail stayed on the server, the server administrator could
>back up the files regularly.

And if you could only have your cake, and eat it too, then...

>The IMAP protocol, from what I understand, solves these problems.  The
>server is manipulated with remote commands to read, delete, store,
>search, and retrieve mail.

IMAP has a problem of its own:

   IMAP2 differs from the DMSP protocol of PCMAIL (RFC 1056) in a more
   fundamental manner, reflecting the differing architectures of MM-D
   and PCMAIL.  PCMAIL is either an online ("interactive mode"), or
   offline ("batch mode") system.  MM-D is primarily an online system in
   which real-time and simultaneous mail access were considered
   important.

Translated from RFC-ese, this means that if your network is down, your
old mail is UNAVAILABLE.  It also means that users with dialups must tie
up their phone lines to use old mail.  It also means that users with slow
connections must wait for messages they want to read (old ones) to be
downloaded again.

In other words, you only use IMAP on a fast, reliable Internet connection.

The other protocol referred to (PCMAIL) is hard to implement, but is
the One True Way (IMHO).  Mail stays on the central server, but is cached
(as disk permits) on any number of 'client' systems.  These systems
periodically 'sync' themselves with the server, so that you get a consistent
view of your mail from anyplace you read it.  Nifty, nifty, nifty.

If I had my way, I'd be teaching Eudora PCMAIL; unfortunately, the people
who sign my paycheck feel differently.
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner