Abstract
Over the past decades, the volume of email exchange has increased dramatically
and it has become one of the world’s most important means of communication.
Due to the rapid increase in email message communication, the service
infrastructure has also evolved in general to provide optimum service to
customers and end users. Among the many technologies invented as components
of email service infrastructure, the Internet Message Access Protocol has
played a great role by introducing a better and improved means of electronic
message manipulation within mailboxes. To fulfill the IMAP protocol implementation,
different email clients have been developed since the birth of IMAP,
and there are a large number of open source and proprietary clients available
for use, all implemented somewhat to drastically differently especially in their
default behavior. This thesis will research whether the differences in their implementation
have effects on server side resource usage.