Why does IT love IMAP?

[Bijan Mobasseri]

We have been converted from POP to IMAP for reasons I don't understand.
Based on a few days that I have been using IMAP, I am not impressed. My mail
reading activities have slowed down to the point of aggravation. Every time
I click on an IMAP mailbox, it has to go out and fetch the stuff (retrieving
message headers every time). Even for deleting messages it has to do the
same thing. I am at work, on a high speed LAN and school is out. From home,
it is slower still. I can see the sync advantage that it brings to the
table, but my time is worth more

....Bijan

 

[William M. Smith]

We have been converted from POP to IMAP for reasons I don't understand.
Based on a few days that I have been using IMAP, I am not impressed. My mail
reading activities have slowed down to the point of aggravation. Every time
I click on an IMAP mailbox, it has to go out and fetch the stuff (retrieving
message headers every time). Even for deleting messages it has to do the
same thing. I am at work, on a high speed LAN and school is out. From home,
it is slower still. I can see the sync advantage that it brings to the
table, but my time is worth more

Hi Bijan!

IMAP speed on a local network (10mb and higher) should be relatively quick.
IMAP speed over a broadband connection (2mb or less) can be a lot slower,
but reasonable to use. Dial-up? This would be a pain.

You should point out the problem on your LAN to your IT folks. If you know
anyone in a different organization using IMAP, ask if you can observe the
speed of his connection to compare it to yours.

If your IT folks ran IMAP on the LAN and POP/SMTP or web access over the
Internet, this would be a reasonable compromise.

Hope this helps! bill

 

[Brett Kottmann]

We have been converted from POP to IMAP for reasons I don't understand.
Based on a few days that I have been using IMAP, I am not impressed. My mail
reading activities have slowed down to the point of aggravation. Every time
I click on an IMAP mailbox, it has to go out and fetch the stuff (retrieving
message headers every time). Even for deleting messages it has to do the
same thing. I am at work, on a high speed LAN and school is out. From home,
it is slower still. I can see the sync advantage that it brings to the
table, but my time is worth more

I run IMAP all the time on a slow dialup line (about 28K throughput) with no
problems.

Hints:

Download the headers only. When you select a message to read it will then
download the entire message. You can also set a limit on the message size
to download (such as nothing bigger than 100K).

-or-

Set your options to automatically download messages for offline reading so
it downloads everything and you can then browse them locally.

IMAP gives you the flexibility to have your messages on the central server,
your local machine, or both.

If your setup is very slow, have an IT person troubleshoot it. It could be
something besides your email that is slowing you down.


Brett