LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Daryl Tester <dt@picknowl.com.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2000 00:56:30 +0930

Re: intranet solution

Dan Shearer wrote:

> Between them, ACAP, LDAP, IMAP make for a very good solution. See
> http://www.cyrusoft.com for an example of a client that does these
> protocols very well. Eudora does them too, but not as neatly.

I must admit, I hadn't thought of ACAP for a while, and when I went
to review what applications do support ACAP, CMU seemed to take a
nose-dive.  As above, I remember Mulberry and Eudora being two
clients that do support it.

> However it looks like ACAP is on the very edge of not gaining critical
> mass. Why? Because it is "just another database for storing options" and
> people can't be bothered seeing why it fills a very special niche.

This troubles me - what else does what ACAP does?  NFS?  :-)

> I'm not a webmail bigot but I do think that this point has validity. If a
> sysadmin has a choice of letting more or fewer protocols he should go for
> fewer. Webmail allows this elegantly.

I don't think elegantly is quite the word for it.  I've had to use
UniSA's Exchange-over-the-web server remotely recently (not over a
LAN), and "apart from" the orders of magnitude increase in traffic,
the inability to import mail cleanly (without resorting to web
scraping) and the drag and drop interface as implemented on a web
browser, the experience was marginally average (and that was without
attachments).  I was pretty happy once I'd found the proper IMAP
servers (fetchmail to the rescue once more).  I find it very
unnerving when admins _force_ webmail on intranets without offering
POP3/IMAP as an alternative.


Regards,
  Daryl Tester

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