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October 12, 1998

IMAP Searches For Its Place

By Jeff Angus and Sean Gallagher

hould you plan to implement IMAP-standard servers and clients? It depends on your situation--most important, whether you already have a standard in place. Experts such as messaging analyst David Ferris of Ferris Research say IMAP doesn't offer enough performance to knock out the existing full-client implementations on which some big organizations have already standardized. Beyond the organizational investment, Ferris says many users won't willingly surrender their full-featured clients for something less. However, he says there are niche spots where these organizations will deploy IMAP clients.

Ferris says the older POP model--lightweight, with a smaller set of features--is proving long-lived and good enough for lots of users, even for organizations that support Internet-mail standards. He also says organizations committed to running their internal mail systems on Internet standards must move to IMAP, though they will get mileage for their mobile users on POP3-standard interfaces.

Emerging enterprises with little infrastructure or multiple-standard messaging systems are free to make the most considered decision. Without an incumbent standard and all the investments (installation, hardware, software, maintenance, debugging experience, and, most of all, user training), those organizations can choose the best price/performance yield. For many, IMAP standards are irresistible, with only 10% of the installation and administration hassles and 75% of the features and power.

Products such as Netscape's upcoming release, Messaging Server 4.0, offer core messaging services with much more scalability than bloated proprietary messaging and groupware products such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, and Lotus Notes. A single server, running on a multiprocessor Solaris server, will scale up to as many as 100,000 light-traffic users, or 50,000 business users. And with the latest implementation of IMAP, Messaging Server users will get features common to groupware, such as sharable message folders, at a fraction of the price per user.

Return to main story, "Net Mail Scales Up."