Re: POP3 Downloads

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 11:48:03AM +0300, Bill Sangiwa wrote:
> 
> with qpopper you can force the server deamon to delete all downloaded 
> msgs, once downloaded, BUT watch that might have repercusions.. my 
> experience even with uidl when links breaks it will start from begining

Depends on your client. Old versions of 'fetchmail' were not good in this
regard; recent versions are much better (I am using 5.3.0)

The POP3 protocol says you cannot flush out the messages marked with DELE
until you get a QUIT. If the session is terminated early, the server must
not delete them. (This is nothing to do with mbox versus maildir,
incidentally)

However the client knows which messages it has downloaded successfully, and
if written properly it should be able to use UIDL to realise this.

Given the source code, you can probably change your POP3 server so that it
deletes DELE messages even if the session is terminated prematurely. If you
did, you would be violating the POP3 protocol. Usually protocols have these
provisions in for a good reason, and you are in risky ground if you violate
them (such as you risk losing people's E-mail messages)

Can you say specifically what POP3 client and POP3 server you are having
this problem with, anyway?

B.

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