Far too kind [LWN.net]

Far too kind

Posted Jan 8, 2010 7:36 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285)
In reply to: Far too kind by dskoll
Parent article: A look at Thunderbird 3

The indexing is a feature for other people. It's one of those feature/bugs depending on your opinion of how things should work and what the rest of your software environment is.

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Far too kind

Posted Jan 8, 2010 20:58 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Well, I disagree with this.

I think that anyone who creates an IMAP mail client that has to *suck all the mail down locally* to do *anything* with it is working on the wrong program.

If that functionality is for some reason *not* already available in IMAP servers, that is where it needs to be put. Anyone who thinks otherwise would seem to rather desperately misunderstand the architecture of IMAP mail.

Once again: difference of opinion

Posted Jan 9, 2010 0:18 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

IMAP is a protocol. It isn't up to you to define how it should be used. It makes an excellent alternative to POP when email is accessed by many different computers.

The way that *I* use IMAP it may as well be POP, if POP was optimized to keep many gigabytes of email available.

Also, the way that I use IMAP, the "server" is an older 1 GHz CPU with 256 MB RAM and a single 5,400 RPM hard disk. All of the machines that I read my email with are far more capable and perform searches much much faster locally.

I find the features of Thunderbird 3 and Evolution to be very useful to me in this situation. These programs and the IMAP protocol work very well for what *I* use it for.