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.

On 2004-01-29 12:33:35 +0000 Chris Green chris@areti.co.uk wrote:

Why is it that so many of them use IMAP as the source of the mail they allow you to access?

It's probably trying to avoid wheel reinvention. IMAP is quite a nice method of remote access (apart from uw-imap) and it moves a lot of the complicated problems from the web interface program to the server. At worst, you have to handle mbox, mh and maildir mailboxes, along with any shared mailboxes, newsgroups and so on. That said IMAP connections often aren't easy to configure, in my experience. They're not used as much as POP3 and normally by power users, so many ISPs and authors aren't very good at describing the settings required: they seem to assume you already know them or can figure them out.

WebMail really wins when you want to be a little paranoid and only open your IMAP server to the places that you know you want access from. A misconfigured/badly written IMAP server will let you send passwords over the net as clear text, and give an attacker full read-write access to all your files. I've seen it done. At least if you only allow IMAP access to your local network and the webmail server, it limits the potential for damage.

If you want a WebMail that does other tricks, you probably will have to look harder to scratch that rarer itch. Please keep your review notes as you go along and publish them afterwards, to save those that follow from repeating your work. You might even get helpful suggestions after you first publish those notes.