>On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 06:00:35PM +1300, Christopher Sawtell wrote: >Actually, you can choose between flushing your mailbox, or keeping the >retrieved messages on the server with POP, too. The big difference is >that with POP you have to retrieve a complete message to obtain any >header info like sender or subject, while with IMAP you can take a >look at the header info without wasting bandwidth for downloading the >message body. Thus IMAP enables you to interactively discard unwanted >mail on the server, which is not possible with POP. Just imagine >someone sending you some 2 MB junk you don't want, and you have a slow >modem... Happened to me when one of my friends who knows nothing about >data or computers sent me some MBs of pics from the company, and I >still had a 14.400 baud modem. A solution to this problem when using >POP is to program a filter on the server that discards any mail bigger >than welcome, and sends a respective message to the originator asking >them to pack their content to a smaller volume.
I seem to read most of my e-mail these days by telnetting into my ISPs POP3 server from work. I can see how much mail I have, I can see how large each e-mail is, and I can retrieve just the headers by asking for the first 20 lines or so of an e-mail, and I can delete e-mails without having to retrieve the whole thing. You can get some of the benefits of IMAP from POP3 by using telnet. And it's a damm site faster than using the ISP's web based mail too. Wayne
