POP/IMAP E-Mail Client Evaluation

Important Note: The criteria for this year's evaluation effort is heavily based on last year's criteria.

The product evaluation focused on software that meets the following basic characteristics:

Strong support for Internet standards: Authenticated SMTP, LDAP directory service, and especially IMAP.

Note: This group is focusing primarily on evaluating IMAP clients vs. POP3 clients based on ISC's recommendation, with a strong preference for IMAP. However, the group acknowledges transition recommendations will need to be outlined for those schools or centers heavily using POP3 clients and whose servers may not be ready to bear the additional disk space required for IMAP client use.

Leave LDAP support in criteria, but it can be weighted against the other criteria. We need to decide whether to make LDAP a requirement or not. This would obviously sway the direction of the Browser Evaluation Team recommendation. Most folks agreed that whatever Browser is chosen, end-users are going to automatically use the e-mail client that comes with it, so it would good to uncover any Messenger issues early.

In particular for this effort is meeting the University AAA requirements for preventing clear text passwords from being sent over the network. Avoid requiring data stream encryption in this effort. Data encryption can be accomplished using PGP for sensitve content. The strategic direction of the University is towards a Kerberos single logon. With this in mind, Standards-based (GSSAPI) Kerberos support and/or TLS as an alternative solution where Kerberos isn't supported, will be given stronger weight, all other criteria and functionality being equal.

Provides central storage of user e-mail messages with remote access to user's inbox. The ability of the client to synchronize efficiently with the IMAP server.

Support for the University of Washington's IMAP Server which uses the Berkeley Mailbox format.



Information Systems and Computing University of Pennsylvania Comments & Questions