On Jul 10, 2009, at 11:29 AM, joseph noonan <joseph at noonan.ws> wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, ravi wrote:
>>
>> A small point: Microsoft's Exchange mail service supported the
>> standards based IMAP protocol for mail access well before Google
>> grudgingly added it to their Gmail service a year or so ago.
>
> A not small point: Microsoft 'supports' IMAP for appropriate values
> of 'support', but they break one of the two major feature of IMAP.
> There are two big features of IMAP that make it superior to POP3:
>
> 1) The ability to read, write, reply, delete, and file mail on one
> computer and go to another and have exactly the same view of your
> mail. Microsoft Outlook supports this feature well.
>
> 2) The ability to do the above on *local* copies of your mail and
> mail folders and then 'sync' these up when online service is
> available again.
It's not clear of you are talking about Outlook or Exchange here -- I have successfully used Thunderbird in offline mode working with an Exchange IMAP server. More later...
-- ravi