Subject: Re: Why is IMAP not more popular?

From: [email-masked] (Paul Mitchell)
Date: 3 Oct 1995 09:37:37 GMT

Nancy McGough ([email-masked]) wrote:
> I think that the biggest reason is simply that people do not know about
> IMAP.  

Yep - I'm not a PINE user, and so only came across IMAP very recently (in fact
from another PINE user).  And I've been a Unix sysadmin for 5 years. 

Certainly in the UK, there's very little talk of IMAP, which is disappointing,
as it looks like it might be the answer to my configuration problems.  That's
if someone would answer my posting and tell me how to get it to work on Solaris
with NIS (dig!).

Paul

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From: [email-masked] (Paul Steckler)
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 09:30:34 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Mark Roseman) writes:
>my call on this is that there are simply no good clients out there.
>the no good clients equates to little demand in the marketplace.
>
>in my experience, most sites looking to set up internet mail will
>go for an accepted standard (namely pop/eudora).  there are a 
>minority that spend enough time looking into the issues deep
>enough to really understand their own needs, and those are the
>ones that tend to be looking for imap stuff.  but most people 
>don't know, and probably don't have the expertise to know.

When I developed my WinBiff program (a Windows email notifier), I went
for POP3 first.  That's where the current demand is.  It was almost
trivial to add IMAP support, because the IMAP protocol, while offering
more options, isn't that different from POP3.  Adding IMAP was 
about 100 lines of code, not much.  I think the Eudora people could add 
IMAP support almost as easily.

-- Paul
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