On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Helmut Walle 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 ...
Hello all, I must apologize - what I wrote is not quite correct. The nice things many of you seem to be able to do with POP prompted me to check the standard (RFC1939). There have been several updates to POP3, and I guess the confusion has partially historical reasons. POP3 has a set of mandatory transaction commands, and the download of complete messages is part thereof. There are some optional transaction commands, and one of them, TOP, retrieves only the header plus the first n lines of a message. The mandatory LIST command returns the size of all listed messages. Whether you can use the optional POP commands, depends not only on your client, but also on the POP server. Cited from the POP3 RFC1939: # POP3 is not intended to provide extensive manipulation operations of # mail on the server; normally, mail is downloaded and then deleted. A # more advanced (and complex) protocol, IMAP4, is discussed in... Cited from the IMAP RFC2060: # IMAP4rev1 permits manipulation of remote message folders, called # "mailboxes", in a way that is functionally equivalent to local # mailboxes. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
