IMAP will conveniently take your email from a locally hosted dinosaur system to a network centric system. This means that (as previously mentioned) if you have not set your IMAP settings to retain emails locally as well you will have nothing when the network connectivity goes down.

“Well I am not a stoodge, and I maintain local copies, so now what smart ass!”

BRILLIANT!! You are absolutely Brilliant, now try porting over your imap emails (without connectivity) to another imap account, or pop account. It wont hold, even when you do an outlook backup (or if your truly stupid and use thunderbird, you have no backup option). All in all, IMAP will be a perfect solution for the future, when the government requires all of us to report our whereabouts 24/7 with some space age digital location device that is always connected, always pining our location, and has our bloodline email too.

OH SNAP!! I forgot, we alreadyt invented the cellphone!

I prefer to keep my mail off the web, call me a dinosaur. Instead I leave messages on server with pop, and create folder sorting rules in my webmail. Takes a little longer (i wish there was a universal approval rule exportabnle to .csv and importable to anywhere).

My argruements may be weak, but the reality is that IMAP becomes a hostile baby when it cannot gain access to web. So in a world of perfect connectivity it is wunderbar, otherwise it is wundershit.

Great solution that is brilliantly annoying.

With IMAP, you trust someone else to hold onto your mail. You trust someone else not to lose your mail. You trust someone not to read your mail.

Would you leave your standard dead tree mail to be held with your local mailman? I think not.

If the mail server is down and you aren’t maintaining local copies, you can’t read *any* of your mail, not just the mail you haven’t read.

Of course, I have the technical ability to run my own server and access my email from anywhere in the wold anyway…

D’oh!

Google has PLENTY of space to give away.

Making the contents publicly accessible is another story.

Google offers no web-accessible space and the upper limit for each email is 10mb. Scott has a point here. But the key isn’t the amount of space offered, it’s about the amount of bandwidth allowed. And for the UO, it’s essentially unlimited.

“You are currently using 26 MB (1%) of your 2695 MB.”

Google has PLENTY of space to give away.

Making the contents publicly accessible is another story.

- in Alphamail: the “send large file” up to 210 megs and “space usage” statistics
- the ability to use your 500 meg account for web based storage and web pages. (this is something google will probably never do because there is no benefit to giving away 500 megs of online space)

plus considering the investment uo has made to server equipment over time, the loss of at least a few jobs, the loss of experts at an educational institution, and the fact just had the Alphamail interface built from scratch in the last year or so, i don’t think they want to get rid of it.

Very zen.