Matthias Andree wrote:
The whole TOP-vs-RETR issue is bogus. TOP isn't ever needed except for
the UIDL emulation code to retrieve Message-IDs. Anything short of
"retrieve everything" or "retrieve by UID" won't work and can miss any
amount of mail at any time. There is no such thing as a "read flag" in
POP3, so there's nothing to avoid and nothing to be gained by using
TOP other than a waste of bandwidth.
I agree with you in general. There is a reason I came around this: I
want to use "keep" with a server that erases RETRieved mail after a QUIT
(MercuryP/NLM v1.48), while TOP does the job (or a RSET after RETR, but
that is even more ugly and code for this deactivated with an #ifdef
_UNUSED_). You could say this server violates the RFC, but who cares? At
least cucipop (AFAIR) also offers this "feature" and it's for sure
activated on some installations.