I had to comment on Ed’s posting today (Outlook and Domino via POP/IMAP)
Tags :Domino 7
I have been down
this path over the years with
numerous clients. I have been through crit-sits and gotten info I
still can't even share because of NDA and everything else with customers
and Lotus. But I can say that POP3 and IMAP on Domino leave much
to be desired. (I state move to DAMO at the end for those looking to skip
ahead)
Let's go back in time. POP3 had numerous
issues with the unread marks and locking the mailfile. In the old
days, R5 and back, if the mailfile got locked by the POP3 task you had
to restart the entire Domino server. Yes I said entire. Documented,
read the technotes if you can find the old ones that showed:
POP3 Server: Unable
to open mail file for xxx/yyy: unable to obtain exclusive access to maildrop
Large attachments caused the issue, a corrupt
message could cause the issue, a bad full moon could cause the issue. Besides
POP3 being an older protocol without true load balancing. Domino
looks to the client to retain the unread table for the host it is hitting
since agents or even API programs could change the Unread ID Table (see
technote #1100308).
I consulted with a couple places that were
looking to rollout wide scale (20,000 users or more) POP3 implementations.
My statement then and now stands at no for Domino and POP. Forget
the other issues around having mail locally, backups, leave on server,
and a slew of others. Heck, there is not even any scheduling ability.
part of the whole reason of using Domino
IMAP had issues a long time for memory
leaks and usage. When it started you would see less that 100 full
blown IMAP users on a box. That got better over time but you still
will not run as many Notes or DWA users. Once again we are back to
full failover ability. IMAP does a fine job of reading the folders
and letting you work online, but the back end processing through Domino
6 left some to be desired. Scalability still has reported issues
in Domino 6, technotes and all. No room for discussion.
Editor note: I have not tested this
in Domino 7 yet so everything might be peachy keen now. But not many
are to the point to upgrade and I don't have the client load of POP/IMAP
to test. Or a desire to configure a load tester for that.
So to close on Ed's posting, why not move
to DAMO if you want the Outlook client. Move to DWA, move to Notes.
But let's get off the older standard of POP. The servers were
made to be a simple storage facility for mail until the client could access
it and grab it from the server. Then someone got smart and asked
why don't we leave it there so I can get it in more than one place. Great
idea, sounds like this needs to move to a server type application. I
understand this was before web mail and some client technologies took off.
I am not disputing that. But why not sell the abilities of
scheduling (not POP as I mentioned), clustering (not POP), alternate client
access to the same data (not POP as the unread tables are different) and
richness of doclinks and other cool things.
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On Friday, November 4th, 2005 by Chris Miller
