This is the eighth in a series of messages describing new features in Isode R14.4, scheduled to ship in April 2009. You can see all of the messages on this blog relating to R14.4 by clicking on this link
Isode's M-Box POP/IMAP Gateway enables IMAP mail clients to access POP mailboxes using IMAP, allowing mobile clients (for instance) to use IMAP capabilities against that mailbox.
Isode R14.4 extends this capability so that an IMAP client can access multiple back-end email servers. This will enable an email client with a single IMAP account access to retrieve messages in multiple accounts (e.g., Yahoo!, AOL and Gmail).
Two modes of access are supported:
- Consolidation of all messages into a single mailbox, so that the accessing client sees just one mailbox containing all messages.
- Presentation of an IMAP mailbox (folder) for each of the back-end email accounts, so that the user can see messages for each account independently.
This capability is available both in M-Box Gateway and in M-Box. In M-Box, the user has a real local mailbox in addition to the back end mailboxes. This is useful to provide a real primary mailbox, while also giving access to the back ends.
A key benefit of this solution is that synchronization with back end mailboxes only happens when the client is connected. This gives much better overall performance for the service provider, relative to a solution that synchronizes the whole time. This is due to two common cases:
- In the first scenario, the user only accesses the mailbox with a mobile client, and so when the user is accessing mail on the backend from the desktop, synchronization simply isn't needed.
- In the second, the user has either become inactive, or simply never checks that particular mailbox - again, synchronization is a waste of resource.
For both of these common scenarios, synchronization on demand gives much more efficient resource utilization.
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