Linked by Jon Jensen on Tue 26th Aug 2008 02:53 UTC, submitted by Ryan Masters
The Book of IMAP: Building a Mail Server with Courier and Cyrus, by Peer Heinlein and Peer Hartleben, is a quality resource for any serious mail administrator. The approach taken is direct, but at the same time it's very expansive, setting this book apart from most others I have read. It's packed full of rich examples which are used to solidify the topic being covered. At several places the authors reach out to explain when the subject is addressing ambiguous or otherwise undocumented information which is to great advantage to the reader and worthy of recognition.
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Member since:
2007-03-04
I use IMAP and Gmail and I think IMAP has to evolve...It shouldn't limit itself to just a simple remote folder and message manager.
1. It's slow. It wasn't designed for our gigabyte email accounts. When I have to sync my computer with my server, it synces one mail after the other. I have hundreds of thousands of email, it takes a huge amount of time. It should create a single zipped file of the headers and send it to my computer, it would be much faster than unzipped individual files. With numerous three-way TCP/IP connections, syncing with IMAP is just too slow.
2. Remote search is weak. Even with Dovecot. Try performing an advanced search and not only is it slow but often you don't get what you're searching because your IMAP server doesn't index attachments, sometimes it only searches headers and discards bodies.
3. No support for tags. While some MUA and webmails now migrated from folders to tags or labels, IMAP still uses folders, so for instance in Gmail I have "Projects" and "To do" tags, if a message has both labels, in IMAP it is physically duplicated.
4. No support for calendar/address book/RSS. I know IMAP is not a calendar server application but nowadays, many MUAs have calendar, RSS and address book integrated and it's essential to be able to sync a calendar, feeds and an address book without the need to set up an LDAP server.
5. Be in par with new needs. IMAP should offer all one expects from a mail protocol these days. I think when you use Gmail and IMAP, you shouldn't lose functionality, power, features and speed. It's time to dramatically upgrade the IMAP protocol, in the meantime, some people are migrating to web applications that have fast, synced, database-indexed emailing, calendar, RSS and address book.
Edited 2008-08-26 06:35 UTC