On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 03:31:06AM -0400, Rob Funk wrote:
Not true. The reason for doing this is that RETR changes the server's
idea of whether the message has been read, while TOP does not. It has
nothing to do with working around some bug.
Since I'm looking at the code now, here's the comment (from pop3.c)
explaining what's going on with TOP vs RETR.
Yes, I read that part of the source before posting. It makes no sense given
that:
(1) According to the RFCs, RETR and TOP should not make any different change
to the mailbox state.
(2) There is no concept of "seen flag" in the POP3 protocol at all, at least
since 1994.
(3) If the protocol exchange "craps out" as it says, then the server should
not update the mailbox state anyway (RFC1939 section 6).
(4) "marking the seen flag is the only way to prevent the message from
being re-fetched on subsequent runs" is untrue. UIDL prevents the message
from being re-fetched on subsequent runs. That's been the case since
RFC1725.
So I can see no _valid_ justification for using "TOP n 99999999" instead of
"RETR n".
Regards,
Brian.