[imp] imp 2.3.x vs TWIG

Rich Lafferty rich@horde.org
Sun, 28 Jan 2001 17:23:07 -0500


On Sun, Jan 28, 2001 at 04:59:57PM -0500, Chuck Hagenbuch (chuck@horde.org) wrote:
> Quoting andrew morgan <morgan@orst.edu>:
> 
> > On a somewhat related note, I don't understand why you would want to make
> > several email accounts appear as one inbox.  If you really want them all
> > to be the same final destination, why not set each one to forward the mail
> > to a single account?  And if they are separate accounts, such as one for
> > business and one for personal, wouldn't you want those accounts to appear
> > separately in webmail?  I wouldn't want them mixed together in a single
> > inbox where the two purposes could be confused.
> 
> I have to say that I agree with this perspective.

I think the red herring there is "single INBOX". I don't think
anyone's suggested that; rather, the idea is to let you access all
of your accounts with a single login from a single application session.

Playing devil's advocate to an extent, but also from experience (and I
tend to collect email addresses):

Why not forward? Some setups (notably ISPs) don't allow it. Sometimes
there's no reliable box to forward *to* (This is ME! I'm occasionally
rebooting into MacOS, so I have my mail pile up on another box and
then pull it down when I know bofh is ready to accept
mail.). Sometimes you want to be able to get at the mail there (say,
on a corporate system using something proprietary internally that
can't talk to an IMAP box elsewhere, but allows external IMAP
connections.) 

Same destination? No! Same interface to read 'em with. Very different
thing; for instance, if I've got four addresses and four accounts each
with a 5MB quota, I want to use all four. Similarly for the
proprietary-protocol note above.

Separately in webmail? Certainly. The original suggestion was
INBOX.foo and INBOX.bar, which is cyrus-ish -- to a UW user, that's
mail/foo and mail/bar -- but someone has since suggested that a
virtual folder per host might be a good idea, giving INBOX.foo.in-box
and INBOX.bar.in-box in cyrusland or foo/in-box and bar/in-box in
UW-land.

I do this now with filters and by teaching mutt that I've got a lot of
mailboxes that are really inboxes each of which needs different From:
headers and so forth, but I've got the advantage of running my own
Unix box to handle the mail and I can install whatever software I want
on it. Webmail, by its nature, needs to be able to figure out the idea
of "separate accounts" if it's going to be able to pull that off, and
there are certainly places where that's a desirable thing to
do. Looking at Pine and Eudora, it's sort of the same idea as "roles"
except that at the same time IMP would also be accessing a particular
IMAP server as part of a role.

  -Rich

-- 
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
 Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
   Concordia University, Montreal, QC                 (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich@alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------