IETF Logo Mail Archive

Re: Internet Draft for flexible proxying of the mail protocols

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> Thu, 28 September 2000 22:30 UTC

Received: from cs.utk.edu (CS.UTK.EDU [128.169.94.1]) by ietf.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1a) with SMTP id SAA04045 for <drums-archive@odin.ietf.org>; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:30:09 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) by cs.utk.edu with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id SAA15027; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:29:27 -0400 (EDT)
Received: by cs.utk.edu (bulk_mailer v1.13); Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:29:22 -0400
Received: by cs.utk.edu (cf v2.9s-UTK) id SAA15008; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:29:21 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (marvin@localhost) by cs.utk.edu with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id SAA14965; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:29:19 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (171.64.13.23 -> windlord.Stanford.EDU) by cs.utk.edu (smtpshim v1.0); Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:29:19 -0400
Received: (qmail 17500 invoked by uid 50); 28 Sep 2000 22:29:17 -0000
To: drums@cs.utk.edu, ietf-smtp@imc.org
Subject: Re: Internet Draft for flexible proxying of the mail protocols
References: <003a01c0289d$78276c80$aa7a83ca@WIN95> <0009280820350.9022-100000@omega.cisco.com> <bgc7ts4q0qghd3ns2bskk2g4c3g84sd4v8@4ax.com>
In-Reply-To: "Lee Thompson"'s message of "Thu, 28 Sep 2000 14:04:57 -0700"
From: Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
Organization: The Eyrie
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 15:29:17 -0700
Message-ID: <yllmwcm9qa.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>
Lines: 21
User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) XEmacs/21.1 (Channel Islands)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:drums-request@cs.utk.edu?Subject=unsubscribe>

Lee Thompson <lt@seattlelab.com> writes:

> I wouldn't say POP3 is dying.  At least not from where I sit.  Most ISPs
> appear to not want to be message stores for people either.  (Large
> corporations and Universities, I'm sure, love IMAP.)

We much prefer POP from the server side.  The protocol is far simpler
(after having had to implement a very small portion of the IMAP protocol
once, I'm rather afraid of it; I think it's one of the most complicated
and difficult protocols that I've seen), the clients are far more reliable
(we rarely see oddities with POP clients, but IMAP clients routinely do
all sorts of strange things), and a POP server is much lighter weight on
the server side and can handle significantly more users.

Of course, the users understandably want the features of IMAP so we're
getting pushed in that direction, but there will definitely be a price
corresponding to much higher server resources and administrative time
needed over POP.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

v2.29.0 | Report a Bug | By Email | System Status