fetchmail-friends
[Top] [All Lists]

[fetchmail] Re: keep and top

2003-05-26 01:44:40
Quoting from Eric S. Raymond's mail on Sat, May 24, 2003 at 02:18:40AM -0400:
Matthias Andree <ma(_at_)dt(_dot_)e-technik(_dot_)uni-dortmund(_dot_)de>:
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.

Wrong.

TOP is different from RETR in one important way.  It doesn't set the
message's seen bit.

I think it doesn't matter what mail flags are set on the server.
fetchmail with UIDL does not use or rely on any mail flags as reported
by the server. Complete tracking is done only on the client side.

Since UIDL is the only reliable, safe, server-quirks-independent
mechanism to download mails from a POP3 server, the issue of
TOP-vs-RETR is indeed bogus for such servers.

There is no need for fetchmail to rely on POP3 flags anyway. If one is
really interested in maintaining server flags, one should be using
IMAP which gives proper control over the flags. As Matthias Andree has
been proposing, fetchmail should use UIDL by default with POP3.

-- 
Sunil Shetye.

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>