[Dovecot] Sending email over IMAP?

[Kenneth Porter]

On Thursday, May 04, 2006 11:46 AM -0500 Eric Rostetter 
<rostetter at mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

> This would save bandwidth _if_ you use a remote sent-mail folder.  Other
> than that, I see no reason/advantage for it...

A remote sent folder is an important advantage of using IMAP over POP3. It 
allows most of one's persistent state to be accessible from any client. 
(LDAP does the same for the address book.)

> At best, it introduces problems like handling the case where one operation
> (sending it) works but the other (saving it to sent-mail) fails.  How
> do you resolve that?

If one uses a remote sent folder, these two operations are one.

Historically I wouldn't argue for this proposal, if everyone used email for 
sending small memo-like messages. But increasingly email is used as a 
universal point-to-point file transfer server for fairly large files, and 
having to push those files up the slow side of an asymmetric pipe *twice* 
is not user-friendly. (For frequent correspondents I set up shared DAV 
folders on my web server, accessible over authenticated HTTPS.)