Enough already

[Bart Silverstrim]

Karl F. Larsen wrote:
>   Here is my reason why IMAP doesn't work well with large email's. The
> IMAP principle is to send only the title of the message to me. I need to 
> try and read it and then it decides to let me d/l the 8 MBytes of 
> message with a .wmv file attached. This d/l period can be VERY long when 
> IMAP is not working well. In fact I have tried to stop the long d/l and 
> that fails too :-)
> 
>     Contrast that to the POP3 method. When it gets a email it brings the 
> whole thing with any attachments to my computer. When I click to play 
> the attached movie or .ppp file it is right there and starts immediatly.
> 
>     So that is the way things are with Gmail. IMAP just quits for some 
> period caused by a glitch at Google. And the large emails are a real 
> problem. POP3 is seldom down due to Google and it brings every email to 
> my computer complete.

Funny part is that back when I worked at a small ISP, we had situations 
come up where POP servers would get blocked by large or corrupted 
emails, so it's not just an IMAP vs. POP thing. Users would have to have 
us delete a message manually or use a web interface on the server 
locally to get rid of the one causing hiccups.

Maybe it's something directly related to their implementation, I don't 
know. All I can say is that email was never "designed" to handle huge 
attachments. People using it that way are risking problems. Another 
reason we simply disabled large attachments with a bounce telling the 
originator what was wrong.

But google's a different animal...they encourage you to share your 
personal data with them :-)