imap

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Quoting Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:13:46

> In other words, once you use Cyrus, you can never access your mail any
> other way.  No thank you.  The other imap clients leave your mail in
> /var/spool/mail. and so when you're local (or sshed in through the
> firewall) you can read it using mutt directly out of the spool.

One thing I forgot to mention in my reply.  IMAP servers keep flags for each
mail (seen, replied, deleted, and so on).  IMAP servers that can use standard
unix mbox from /var/spool/mail usually store those flags as additional headers
(some of them don't send those headers to the client, but they are there on the
disk).  Mutt might know about them, but it might not.  Mutt might know how to
correctly handle them for this or that IMAP server, but on the other hand it
might not.  Plus there's locking issues if IMAP server and mutt are accessing
same file (will IMAP server rescan mailbox for updated flags, or will it assume
that IMAP server was the only one who could have changed them).

Because of all that, it is much much safer to use IMAP to access your email,
even if you are logged in the machine where your mail spool resides.  If you go
with this advice (rather good advice, IMHO), than it doesn't make any difference
how and where the email is internally stored on the disk (standard unix mailbox,
MH, Cyrus database, whatever).

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7