Exec'ing a script from Cyrus when imapd has a client

[Simon Matter]

> On Mon, 26 Oct 2009, Xavier Bestel wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 10:07 -0700, David Lang wrote:
>>> On Mon, 26 Oct 2009, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>>>
>>>> At Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:37:30 -0700 (PDT), David Lang
>>>> <david.lang at digitalinsight.com> wrote:
>>>> Subject: Re: Exec'ing a script from Cyrus when imapd has a client
>>>>>
>>>>> I possibly missed it, but I didn't see anything that said that
>>>>> fetchmail was
>>>>> grabbing things via IMAP.
>>>>
>>>> Yup, I think you missed it.
>>>>
>>>>> if you have intermittent/expensive-per-min internet connectivity
>>>>> doing something
>>>>> like this has value.
>>>>
>>>> Nope, not really.   All modern useful IMAP clients can work offline
>>>> too.
>>>>
>>>> All another IMAP server is doing is adding to the complexity _and_
>>>> decreasing, i.e. lowering, the robustness of the overall solution.
>>>>
>>>>> another reason to run your own server is just to be free from quotas.
>>>>> many ISPs
>>>>> have small mail quotas.
>>>>
>>>> All modern useful IMAP clients can also store message locally --
>>>> moving
>>>> them from server to server, or server to local (or back), is as simple
>>>> as selecting and saving/dragging messages between folders.
>>>
>>> in my mind, having the IMAP client copy all messages to the local drive
>>> goes a
>>> long way to defeating the benifits of using IMAP in the first place.
>>
>> The drive is not exactly local, it's on a separate server (which does
>> mainly mail and file server), which is accessed remotely or not,
>> depending on who uses it and when.
>
> I was responding to Greg, who was saying that all modern IMAP clients will
> copy
> the mail to the local drive so that they can work offline.

There is another point which can be very important in the corporate world:
even if the mail clients are so wonderful that they can connect to
multiple servers and copy mail between them and you can configure
everything so nicely in a hundred config windows and tabs, maybe you
simply don't want to configure it on the client side but prefer to do as
much as possible on the server side. Then you can use tools like
fetchmail, cronjobs, scripts to glue things together. That way you are
also free to use whatever client you want, you don't depend so much on the
clients features.

Regards,
Simon