[MlMt] Maildir support?

Benny Kjær Nielsen mailinglist at freron.com
Tue May 24 07:20:04 UTC 2011


On 24 May 2011, at 2:18, Emory Lundberg wrote:

> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 06:49:10PM -0400, Mike Alexander wrote:
>
>> That's one of the real advantages of IMAP, you can look at a message
>> without downloading the attachments, HTML parts, etc.  Caching
>> everything sort of defeats that, especially if you use more than one
>> machine to view EMail.

Well, one of the main features of MailMate is that it is an IMAP client 
which is fully functional when being offline.

> Especially on a notebook or mobile device.

In particular, I prefer an offline IMAP client on a notebook. It has 
plenty of space and I often find myself in situations where I'm not 
online when using a notebook.

Variants of IMAP client behavior required to satisfy everybody(?):

1) Offline IMAP (MailMate).
2) Offline IMAP with shared local storage.
3) Online IMAP with no long-term storage/cache.

And I also get requests for making it easy to store messages locally 
only, either to save space on the server or because the server is 
distrusted for storage (but not for transmission). Essentially using 
IMAP for POP3-like behavior.

The main advantages of 2) and 3) are faster initial synchronization and 
smaller local storage space required. To be honest, there are many other 
optimizations of MailMate I would prioritize higher than these. I know 
it may be a deal-breaker for some users. (I do know that some users need 
solution 3 due to company policy.)

I do understand the virtues of online IMAP clients, but MailMate is 
designed to be an offline IMAP client. Given time, some online-like 
behavior may be added (such as not downloading attachments), but it is 
non-trivial and it requires use of IMAP functionality which I have so 
far avoided in order to not having to deal with even more server-bugs.

-- 
Benny


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