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[James Bucanek]

Stroller wrote on Sunday, April 17, 2005:

>I'm pretty sure that IMAP commands like "move this message to that 
>folder" shouldn't require the whole message to be sent back to the 
>server & back down again, and are really fairly efficient.

No, the message doesn't have to sent back.  But even just sending a command back to the server to move a message is still orders of magnitude slower than just writing the data to my local drive.

And "fairly efficient" is relative to one's taste.  ;)

>The suggestion that a mail-client should do filtering upon IMAP 
>messages is just abhorrent to me. I appreciate that you used IMAP only 
>from this single client, but for me server-side filtering is essential 
>- I can check IMAP from my new PDA, which is only interested in the 
>contents of Inbox. Sure, I can move something from Inbox to Read on my 
>PDA, but I have no interest in accessing the hundreds of mailing-list 
>messages I get each day from it - considering what my provider charges 
>for GPRS access, this is undoubtedly a disappointment to them.

Again, this is great if you are doing "simple" filtering (i.e. basic pattern matching on a single message).  But some of my filtering consists of complex filtering and processing of multiple messages.  A single message (say, a server status message that indicates an item is in a queue) will cause Mailsmith to start an AppleScript that then searches another mailbox for a matching message with the same transaction number indicating that the item has been processed.  The AppleScript will transfers both messages to a third mailbox if a match is found, or notifies me if one isn't found.  You just can't do that on the server with IMAP.

-- 
James Bucanek <mailto:privatereply at gloaming.com>