> > That isn't "All you can reasonably do with POP3", it's perfectly
> > reasonable to treat a POP3 server as a single mailbox much the
> > same as a local mailbox file. You can see a list of the E-Mail
> > messages in a POP3 mailbox, you can selectively view messages in
> > a POP3 mailbox and you can selectively delete messages in a POP3
> > mailbox.
>
> You may wish to notice that even the TOP command is _optional_ with
> POP3, as is UIDL. POP is an e-mail download protocol, and you
> should not try to overload it with other functionalities.
I haven't yet encountered an ISP POP3 server that doesn't do TOP. I've
only found one that didn't do UIDL.
Note that fetchmail quite happily uses "TOP n 999999" instead of "RETR
n" to retrieve e-mail. According to the comments in fetchmail's
pop3.c, this method very rarely fails. (I saw a case recently where it
did fail, but this was because the server had a buggy implementation
of TOP, not because it didn't implement TOP.)
> > Neither are any local mail folders _necessary_ with a POP3
> > mailbox if you're happy with a single folder to store mail. POP3
> > can store mail, IMAP4 just adds the ability to have multiple,
> > differently named folders. Both are quite similar from a user's
> > point of view, you can get a list of mail headers, you can
> > download individual messages to the local system.
>
> Have you ever stored a message in a POP3 folder without going
> through the mail transport agent, i.e., without resending the
> message? There is no standard way to do this.
I'm not even aware of a non-standard way of doing it. And the other
thing you can't do to a POP3 mailbox is adjust the flags at will. So a
POP3 mailbox is like a semi-read-only mailbox: delete is the only
state-changing operation you can do.
This is the main problem, isn't it? It would take some reorganisation
of Mutt to cope with a mailbox being almost but not quite read-only.
This reorganisation might be of benefit anyway, to get a cleaner
internal API. If I had time I would probably try to implement an
IMAP-style POP3 facility in Mutt ...
Edmund
