Re: [Asrg] Generally workable ways of adding a spam button to MUAs

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Fri, 05 February 2010 15:19 UTC

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Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:20:46 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Generally workable ways of adding a spam button to MUAs
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>> Actually, we've seen a reasonable suggestion a few messages back that
>> would work equally well with POP and IMAP: extract a reporting address
>> from the message and send it an ARF report.
>
>Which is certainly not at all simpler than setting an IMAP flag on a 
>message. And (if it's what the user desires) moving it out of the INBOX.

Can I ask people to stop making the newbie mistake of assuming that
all mail systems are, or should be, just like the mail system they
happen to use?  

I think IMAP is swell, I've used it for years, I've encouraged my
users to switch to it, but many of them won't.  They're not just being
stubborn--they prefer to have their archive of mail in a place that
they control, or they're connected intermittently and it's faster to
download and delete with POP than do the equivalent in IMAP.  The
tradeoffs in running a mail system for the students and staff at a
university, or for the employees of an equipment manufacturer, are not
the same as the ones at a consumer ISP or other kind of organization.
The world is not going to switch to 100% IMAP and it is just wasting
our time to pretend that it is.

R's,
John