General IMAP functionality

[Michael F. Sprague]

Warrick FitzGerald said:
<SNIP>
> That's what I was afraid of. Sounds to me like the people who aren't
> going to "get" this concept should keep using POP3 :)
>
> 1. Does anyone have "best practices" that I can share with users on how
> they should move mail off the server when their quota is exceeded?
>
> 2. What is considered a reasonable quota (I know this is a very broad
> question)? When working with POP3 I would allocate users a max of 50 MB,
> when does a mailbox have so many messages that it puts a burden on the
> server?

Here's something to keep in mind.  POP3 will download the messages from
the server and store them on the user's desktop (by default).  Thus space
issues on the server are not as important unless the user is away for a
period of time.  IMAP stores all of the email on the server and nothing is
stored on the desktop.

Pros/Cons?  Well if you check email from several places, then IMAP is the
way to go since you'll always be looking at the same mailbox.  If you only
check email from one place, then POP3 may be better for you.

The big thing for me is backups.  I don't know about your site, but in
most places desktops are not backed up.  So if a user wipes his/her
machine, bye bye to all saved email.  On the flip side, servers are
usually backed up so if a user wipes out his/her messages, you can get
them tape.

If you end up using IMAP for most of your users, now storage is more on
you as the admin than the user.  What quota to set will depend 100% on
your user's needs.  I have some users with over 1GB of email in their IMAP
mailbox while most have much less than that.  Maybe 100MB is a good place
to start for your users and you use some automated trash removal routines
to clean things up a bit.

Overall, it may take you a few  months to figure out the users' usage
patterns and then you'll be able to make adjustments from there.

Thanks,
mikeS

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