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Subject: Re: pop-before-smtp (was Re: FreeInet and checking mail?)
From: Jason Hoos (jhoosthwack.net)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2000 - 13:32:09 CDT

> You should study the behaviour of existing IMAP clients a little more
> closely before you make such claims. Some are rather "nasty" in the way
> they hold even multiple connections open.

Another detail that is somewhat pertinent to the discussion, as it
relates to scalability and whether uploading outbound messages to the IMAP
server would affect it - many IMAP clients already upload outbound mail
to the IMAP server in the form of a "Sent Items" folder. Outlook Express
does this by default, and Netscape can be set up to do so very easily.
So in fact, by adding an outbound extension to IMAP you might actually
be *reducing* network traffic, since you could upload the message to
IMAP once (and design the extensions such that you can tell the server
"here's this message, throw it into the outbox and the Sent Items folder"),
instead of uploading the message twice (once to IMAP and once to SMTP).
Granted, if the IMAP box in turn just forwards the outbound message to
an outbound SMTP server there's no real reduction of traffic, but there's
no increase either in most cases...

Jason Hoos
jhoosthwack.net