OT again... is there an IMAP expert in the house?

[Jonathan Hogg]

On 28/1/2002 18:01, in article
0730AFCEC413B6C2.179E313D52DC8EC5.95825B8852993CFB at lp.airnews.net, "Cameron
Laird" <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> wrote:

> Nope.  Both POP3 and IMAP4 specifically disallow concurrent access,
> I believe.  My belief is sufficiently certain, in this case, that
> I'll not invest the time to verify it in the standards.

Back in the olden days when I used to use and maintain pine at University, I
recall there being a number of IMAP read-only mailboxes at University of
Washington that were used to distribute information about pine in a sort of
announcement-newsgroup kind of way. These must have been concurrent access,
so wouldn't be so sure about IMAP disallowing it.

In fact from an article at Uni of Washington:

> IMAP protocol advantages:
[...]
> -Can support concurrent updates and access to shared mailboxes.
[...]

[Found this as the top item in a google search of "IMAP concurrent access".
Wahay for google.]

I would suspect though that many IMAP clients, while they expect messages to
appear in mailboxes, probably get upset at messages disappearing on them. I
don't think this is anything to do with IMAP, but is a problem with them
assuming they have sole access to the mailbox (other than the delivery
program).

Jonathan