Re: Mark: Heads-up on Alpine?

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Outsider wrote:
The Alpine web site does not offer very much info. It seems like you may
be getting to a point where you may be willing to answer a few questions?

If you subscribe to the Alpine mailing list (this is described on the Alpine web page), you will get instructions on how to get a test version of Alpine. The current test version is 0.98, and 0.99 will be out shortly. We hope that a full public release of 1.00 will be very soon after that.

When you call Alpine stateful, I assume you mean in a "client" sort of way
like Thunderbird for example - cacheing folder information; it uses an
existing imap server.

It is IMAP, and the IMAP sessions, that are stateful. Pine/Alpine do not keep state between sessions.

Alpine works the same way that Pine does; it uses the native facilities of IMAP to build state in the client over the life of a session. All the mailbox data is kept on the server, and a copy of the mailbox is NOT kept on the client.

This is NOT the way that programs such Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc. work. These programs treat IMAP like a glorified POP; they essentially ignore IMAP state, and instead use IMAP only to synchronize a copy of the mailbox on the client with that on the server. Otherwise, they does all message operations as local file operations on the client.

This difference in model is discussed in RFC 1733.

As for which is "better", it depends entirely upon your usage. If you are a person where everything is in your laptop and the server is just a temporary staging point, and that is all you ever use, then the "glorified POP" model may be better for you.

If, on the other hand, you routinely use multiple stations a day (I use at least 4!) then you may not want copies of your mail spread around like that. If you use a mobile device with a GMRS link, you may not want to have your session going through a large synchronization step for a mailbox with 6-digit message count. If you frequently use shared stations, you almost certainly do not want to have bits of your mail left behind.

The "glorified POP" model is MUCH easier to program, so there are many more clients that use it.

Ultimately, though, it is a religious issue; and as such you are not going to convince the true believers on either side.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
.

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