[imp] Re: problem with Folder lists

[Andrew Morgan]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Chris Barnes wrote:

> Joseph Brennan <brennan at columbia.edu> wrote:
> > Not at all.  Pine and Imp are the ones you can control, and it's
> > nice if they use the same folders.  Likewise you might default
> > Imp's sent mail folder to be sent-mail like Pine.
>
> I guess I'm at a loss to understand why Imp has such a bad performance
> hit when it is told the folders are on the user's root directory, when
> other Imap clients don't seem to have a problem.  Most of them even have
> a way to mark which files are folders and which are not (and only
> display those that are marked).

Maybe it has to do with IMAP subscriptions?  I know a lot of mail clients
default to only showing "subscribed" IMAP folders.  So the user has to go
select the folders to subscribe to before they are scanned.  There is a
prefs setting in imp/config/prefs.php for this, but I've never tried it
set to '1'.

> > For the PC clients, your choices are:
> >
> > (1) Educate the PC client users to configure mail/ as the "prefix"--
> > this is called different things in different clients.
>
> You don't have "users" who are 62 year old secretaries that call you
> because their anti-virus program finds a bug in an attachment?  Can you
> imagine the nightmare trying to get them to
>   a) change a setting in their email client
>   b) logon and manually move the folders that arlready exist
> would be.
>
> Now granted, from a standpoint of purely organizing files in a person's
> home directory, changing the PC client to point to the same pine /mail
> directory is nice (very nice).  I just don't see it as a valid option
> for a large number of my users.

I'm supporting an entire university using a mix of Pine, IMP, and desktop
IMAP clients here.  We just document how to correctly setup each client.
We have a pretty good support environment here that end users can get help
from.

Personally, I don't think walking out to 150 different client machines and
configuring them correctly is too much trouble.  If you have the
documentation and infrastructure in place to make sure it stays fixed and
new clients are configured correctly, I think that is a better solution.

	Andy