IdoNotes (and sleep)

I had to comment on Ed’s posting today (Outlook and Domino via POP/IMAP)

by Chris Miller at 02:41:06 PM on Friday, November 4th, 2005

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.

Location: St. Louis, MO

Category: Domino 7 Rant Technical
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