Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 318.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2023-11-17 17:01:00+00:00
        From: Robert Royar <robert@royar.org>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.305: why e-mail

On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 1:52 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
>         Date: 2023-11-13 23:43:52+00:00
>         From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
>         Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.302: why e-mail?
>
 [...]

>
> i mean web based email (e.g. Gmail) vs. client based email (e.g.
> Thunderbird).
> Both Gmail and Thuderbird support POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3)
and IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) as the mail server protocols.


Local file systems may use maildir as the physical container management
system for either IMAP or POP3. I am not sure whether a free Gmail account
allows you to convert to POP3, but the last time I added a user to my
enterprise account POP3 was still an option. The POP protocol pops the mail
message from the server and leaves it stored in the client--thus making it
inaccessible to your other devices. IMAP keeps the message stored on the
mail server but modifies its metadata to indicate that its state has
changed (e.g. it has been read; it has been marked for removal; it has been
tagged in some way). You can always copy mail from the server to your
machine with IMAP. You can also move the message to your computer. You can
even copy/move an IMAP message to another server if your client has
multiple servers in its known hosts.

I have four different accounts on three different servers, and I often drag
a message from a folder on one account to a folder on another. When I
retired I drug all of my work messages to my "retired" used account on my
Google Enterprise account.

Perhaps the main distinction between users is age in that younger users
were not around (i.e. born) when the late Mark Reed Crispin was posting all
those RFCs about how to implement a better system than POP. For a long time
POP was popular with providers because it deleted messages from the server
when they were read, saving precious space. Today, users are probably
unaware of what the underlying code running is or actually does. So, they
are unconcerned about where their mail is stored so long as they can access
it.

Perhaps a good study would be to compare the old Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
and BBS Chat rooms with today's reddit and FaceBook type programs.


--
               Robert Delius Royar
 Caught in the net since 1985


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