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- Terry, in your comparision with NFS you ought to mention that IMAP has the
- distinct advantage of being able to access mail at remote (not local to your
- own network) sites efficiently. NFS takes a big performance loss as soon as one
- introduces routers. And, certainly one cannot use NFS across the country!
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- Since IMAP's introduction to our laboratory in 1987 I have carefully observed
- the impact of IMAP network traffic in comparion to NFS, ftp, X11, etc ...
- Currently, we routinely have 50-75 imapusers locally, and even when this number
- was more than double (we added an additional server isolated behind a bridge),
- IMAP has never taken even 1% of the total packet traffic. In fact IMAP coupled
- with SMTP is about 1%. When Mark and our group designed this protocal we wanted
- to maximize the information and at the same time minimize the network
- utilization. I think this goal has clearly been acheived. IMAP is extremely
- frugal with respect to its bandwidth utilization.
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- Bill
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