On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 12:33, Chris Green wrote:
Why is it that so many of them use IMAP as the source of the mail they allow you to access? It seems pointless as the whole idea of IMAP is to provide remote access to your E-Mail.
IMAP is a way of accessing the contents of a mailbox, that happens to work over a network connection. It's Internet Mailbox Access Protocol. It's not designed specifically for remote access, but also as an abstraction layer from how the mails are actually stored on disc. A webmail system is likely to work with many more systems if it speaks IMAP than access the files directly on disc. It also means that your CGIs and such don't need permissions to read the files. It's completely sensible, and exactly the right way to do it.
If you have a mail client which can read mail using IMAP then you don't need WebMail at all do you?
How do you work that out? My mother used to routinely use webmail on her home machine rather than set up a mail client to talk IMAP to our co-located box, simply because when she travels she's presented with an identical interface that doesn't require configuring, where ever she is.
Apart from anything else WebMail tends to be slower and is an unfamiliar interface. Some E-Mail clients even handle POP3 mailboxes 'remotely' quite successfully. (I think it's either xfmail or xcmail that does this)
It's only unfamiliar if you're not familiar with it :) I use Evolution at home, but when I'm on the road, I almost always use our webmail if the best I can access is a web browser.
It would make much more sense if WebMail applications allowed you to access mailboxes that *aren't* normally readable remotely.
Which they can do. The whole point of webmail is not to let you access mail remotely that you otherwise wouldn't be able to, but to access it using a piece of software almost every desktop computer on the internet already has: a web browser.
What I'd find really useful is a WebMail application that will let me read a tree of mbox mailboxes on a remote server.
Just install an IMAP and be done with. You'll find it's almost certainly quicker having a webmail client talk IMAP to to the server, which then handles the files on disc. It'll be faster, and give you more choice over which webmail client you use. Which is why IMAP is exactly the right thing for them to talk.