[imp] Mail clients and contact database lock-in

[Graeme Wood]

ACAP and IMSP were supposed to provide this kind of functionality. They 
were never taken up and the protocols are now moribund and no clients 
support them.


On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Jaap Winius wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> For the past six years I've been using IMP as my main mail client.
> While others prefer to use dedicated GUI mail clients instead, I love
> the fact that my client is the same everywhere and I'm never without
> my complete and up to date contact list.
>
> Nevertheless, I have more than a few users who have ended up using a
> dedicated GUI mail client anyway. I can't help imagining, though, that
> they might have remained a little more interested in IMP/Horde if they
> could at least have continued to access -- or better yet, maintain --
> their Turba contact list from within their favorite mail client. My
> impression is that users who were once freed by IMAP/POP to use almost
> any mail client they wanted, still end up using only one in the end
> because of contact database lock-in. In the same way, even we IMP
> users are, to a lesser degree, locked into our Horde databases where
> the Turba contact information is stored.
>
> I suppose it is possible to use LDAP to make Turba contact information
> available elsewhere, but I hear that of the mail clients that do
> include LDAP support, this is limited to email address lookup only. I
> don't believe that implementing this would help very much to change
> any minds.
>
> Has the idea of making Turba contact information more available ever
> been given any serious consideration? Is there, perhaps, a Thunderbird
> plug-in that I haven't heard of yet? It would be interesting to hear
> what other people have to say about this subject.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jaap
>

-- 
Graeme Wood, Unix Section of the IT Infrastructure Division,
Information Services, The University of Edinburgh
Email: Graeme.Wood at ed.ac.uk Phone: +44 131 650 5003 Fax: +44 131 650 6552

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