[Gllug] OpenChange and SOGo

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2011, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:

> On 2 February 2011 02:13, John Edwards <john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk>
> wrote:
> >
> > For reading email Cyrus IMAP is quite good, and most email clients
> > deal with IMAP well - with the inevitable exception of Microsoft
> > Outlook and some mobile phones.
> 
> I do not like the IMAP protocol.
> It is really slow.

Thinks like switching view order by size, searching, thread view (newer
IMAP rfcs define this and not all IMAP server can do it) and other
actions are significantly faster on a powerful backend IMAP server
compared to my desktopm especially against large mail folders.  The
times I see slowness are entirely understood if annoying/unavoidable,
such as when the imap server is in another continent.

> If you take the typical use case.
> 1) Display to the user the latest 10 email headers in the inbox. I.e.
> From, To, Subject, Date
> All IMAP clients I have seen have to first get the headers of every
> single email in the inbox, and this could be >1000

I'm pretty sure that's now PINE has done it for decades.  You can
visibly see it is slightly slower for newer parts of your inbox that
you've not viewed yet.  It opens the inbox very quickly, significantly
faster than mutt's default of using a disk cache for the headers which
is slow on large mailboxes.  It has in-memory caches for the headers its
seen, so moving around is fast once it's already selected a folder.
Then when you go in to an email there is a slight delay again.

Its searches are on-server too; it's probably the most "online" IMAP
client there is.  One of the core authors was involved in the design of
the IMAP protocol.

There used to be an Elm vs PINE battle, in the same was as with Emacs vs
VI.  Then the vast majority of the world stopped using or never
experienced command line clients and they also added configuration for
PINE so you configure away all the lame n00b settings and make Vim your
editor for example.
 
> I want a simple protocol that does the following:
> 1) emails

IMAP

> 2) Calendar

I use Google calendar and like it.  It can automatically convert emailed
Outlook invites in to calendar events, sync with mobile phones, send SMS
alerts for events and generally works well for me.

I would argue that Calendar isn't Email and that people are only
familiar with it because MS forced it on the work and it took over in
companies like mad making it the norm to integrate them.

> 3) Server side email content search.

IMAP

> 4) Be able to cache emails locally at the client, so that they can be
> read offline.

Your choice of IMAP client and its config.  I often attach direct to a
Google IMAP server, but if I'm connecting to a distant one and want some
nippyness, I sync with offlineimap.py and have configured it to only
pull a few folders.

> 5) If one email user decides an email is junk, automatically tag it as
> junk in all other email boxes.
 
Gmail uses signals which can include saving an email to the Spam/ folder
as something that will influence further delivery for other user
mailboxes.
 
> Then, the email client can be a lot thinner, and work just as well on
> a mobile device.

I've been using PINE on mobile devices for about 12 years, the Nokia
9000 and 9110 only supported telnet, but we considered it okay
considering GSM is not exactly trivial to snoop for your average joe
chancer hacker.  I then used 9210, 9500, 9300i, e90, n97 all keyboarded
Nokias running Symbian PuTTY (ssh) to screen+pine.  Now my Nokia n900
can run PINE (actually alpine) itself, but actually I tend to just
openssh to a screen session, 12 years later!

Damion
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