email/colo -- amazing response... thanks...

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 steve at horne.homelinux.net wrote:

> Chris Devers <cdevers at pobox.com>
> writes...
> > Locally, we'd use a web-based or POP interface (Outlook Express? <gag cough>)
> 
> "You are early enough in the process not to make that mistake: go with
> IMAP, not POP. It lets you keep your folders and (sometimes) configuration
> (e.g. address books, etc) on the mail server, so that, for example, people
> can check mail from work & home and have the same view of everything
> either way."
> 
> What's IMAP?  Sorry, no clue.

Sorry, I was trying to define it by example, but I guess I wasn't clear
enough.

POP is Post Office Protocol, so-called because it works like a post office
box: the mailman puts the mail in a container for each customer, and the
customer periodically comes by to pick up her mail and bring it home,
emptying out the mailbox in the process. With this model, the post office
is only responsible for delivering the mail, but once the mail is "brought
home", how you manage it is all up to you.

IMAP, on the other hand, stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol [?, err,
I think that's what it stands for, maybe I should double-check...]. In
this model, the "post office" provides not just a single mailbox that
you're expected to take your mail from regularly, but a collection of
mailboxes and folders, and you're encouraged to keep all of your mail on
the server. Mail clients may cache copies of mailboxes for offline use
(which is useful for laptops and pdas), but the standard storage place for
mail in IMAP is on the server, not the client. 

The downside is that the storage requirements on the mail server can be
huge, depending on people's habits, but if you have a policy of making
users transfer mail to local storage or removable media [cd, tape] for
archiving then it's not so bad. 

In return for this management overhead, you give your users a lot of
flexibility. Mail is accessible from anywhere. Users are not locked in to
their mail client-- if you want to move everyone to Mozilla Mail (say),
it shouldn't matter if some people have mail archives locked in Outlook's
proprietary database format, because as long as everything is also on the
IMAP server, the Outlook database can be treated as if it's a freely
deletable cache, and you don't have to fight against it. 

Anyone that has had to mov a mail archive from one client to another --
especially Outlook, but it isn't the only culprit here -- will know what a
royal pain in the butt this can be. The nice thing about IMAP is that it
makes this whole class of problems simply evaporate. 

Like I said earlier, most IMAP servers provide a mode that allows users to
access their inbox via POP if they refuse to upgrade, but there's really
no reason to ever use POP again. Think of POP as a small, broken subset of
what IMAP provides. POP is much more well known, and is the protocol that
most ISPs and free mail services providee, but there are some enlightened
ones out there, notably Fastmail.fm. If you sign up for a free account
with them, their service & the documentation they provide may give a
pretty good feel for what you can do with the protocol.
 
> You suggest yahoo -- that's problably a bit too barebones.

Yes, well, that suggestion was partially tongue in cheek, but Yahoo does
actually offer a surprisingly wide variety of services. I'd probably use
them if I didn't feel so uncomfortable with the idea that some company has
a continually updated copy of my contacts, my communications, and my
comings & goings. They're basically offering a free version of the
$99/year .Mac service that Apple is selling, minus the slick desktop
client software -- but since it'll sync with more or less whatever
software you want to use, including Apple's software, it's a really good
deal. Aside from the privacy thing.

But you're right -- for official business use, this may not be an
appropriate choice for a company to make. I wouldn't want anything
confidential to be stored on some other company's servers. 
 

-- 
Chris Devers