Intellectual Ammunition

[Monty Harder]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

>First, you need to avoid using the term "POP" to refer to your present mail
>system.  Exchange includes full POP support, and with that your whole
>argument will be lost.  Because it offers both POP and IMAP support, it can

  You misunderstood what I said - I am told by the internal IS point of
contact at our shop that the Plan is to do away with POP/SMTP access to
mail.  Unless I misunderstand =you=, this means that they will deliberately
disable (or not enable, as the case may be) POP/SMTP service.

>Second, Exchange's mail protocol is similar to IMAP, and the ability to
>store the messages as a database on the server is a great advantage.  It is
>extremely efficient and reliable, and it performs better than any IMAP
setup
>I've seen so far.  Bandwidth and network load will not be an issue.

  I don't see how it's better for me to re-download the message every time I
want to look at it, especially when you add everyone in our office
together - even though we have a T-1, a big chunk of that handles our LD
voice circuits.  But I'll take your word for it, and downplay that argument,
concentrating instead on the fact that mail not explicitly downloaded to the
local HD will be inaccessible whenever that T-1 goes down. When he was
helping me with a glitch in the customer database software I already
mentioned to one of the ITiots that I thought having that database
centralized in South Bend, with no local cache to serve even somewhat stale
info during outages, seemed reckless to me.  So this will just be an
extension of my argument against centralization in general.

  I wonder how many multinational corps had centralized servers in the WTC?
I wonder how many had offsite backup?