Re: Kinda OT: Email clients and Email Management

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Tim:
>> Although you can leave mails on a server with POP3, and just read
>> newer ones, it's not designed for that usage pattern.

Wolfgang Pfeiffer:
> `man fetchmail':
> 
> -------------
> -k | --keep
> (Keyword: keep)
>          Keep retrieved messages on the remote mailserver.  Normally,
>          messages are deleted from the folder on  the  mailserver  after
>          they  have  been  retrieved.  Specifying the keep option causes
>          retrieved messages to remain in your folder on the  mailserver.
>          This option does not work with ETRN or ODMR. If used with POP3,
>          it is recommended to also specify the  --uidl  option  or  uidl
>          keyword.
> -------------
> 
> So it seems, leaving messages on the server after reading is not a
> problem for fetchmail, be it POP3 or whatever usage.

But, and it's a very big but, you're entirely dependent on a POP3
server working in a way that's compatible with that (added) feature. 
It's a kludge hacked on, always remember that.

Even if you have a mail server that doesn't renumber all your messages
between mail runs you need to parse a large list (if you keep messages
on the inbox), and that gets significantly worse as it increases.

On my LAN mail server, using maildir folders accessed with IMAP, I have
one mailing list folder with 19,734 messages in it, and it's a snap to
work through it (load up the list, search through it, read a message,
etc).  And there's over a dozen folders with similarly huge numbers of
mail in each of them.  Trying to deal with a POP3 server with just a
few hundred on it is painful, sometimes even just a few dozen, by
comparison.

So what does happen when a POP3 mail server isn't really compatible
with the feature?

Ordinarily messages are numbered as message 1 in the mailbox, message 2
in the mailbox, etc, as simply as that.  You get sent a list of this
each time, your mail client requests the numbers to be sent, the mail
server deletes the ones it know it sent at the end of the mail run.  If
I delete message 4, then everything after it is renumbered.  If it
receives a new message and inserts it in the middle, rather than tack
it on the end, all the other messages get renumbered.  If the
connection aborts part way through, most will not delete the messages
you already downloaded.  Suddenly, your mail program can't tell which
messages are read, or which are which.

You can try using UIDL options, if supported, where the lists note down
the message-id headers instead of just message #1, #2, #3, etc.  But
they're not guaranteed to be unique, permanent, or even present.

For instance, your message, that I'm replying to now, has this header
> Message-ID: <YgmCpEvNu9eGPe1T@localhost>

The mail server is still dealing with message #1, #2, #3, etc., but now
your mail client also (potentially) has some unique ID numbers to try
and figure out that yesterday's message #14 is today's message #5.

You often find some important message gets left on the server and never
downloaded.  You're not even aware it exists.  You may find that you
have to fetch and delete all other messages to deal with it.  You may
find you can't fetch it, and can only delete it.  Been there, done
that, got the tee shirt.

If you've never used IMAP, then the nearest equivalent experience to it
is virtually every webmail interface (Hotmail, Yahoo mail, gmail,
etc.).  Many of them use IMAP, but even if they don't, they work in the
same way:  Mail is on the server, you have an interface to the lists of
it, you fetch individual messages when you click on them, you
temporarily cache them locally (quicker to reload the same message, but
it's not permanently kept locally).  Sometimes going from one message
to another is quick, sometimes it's slow either because of networking
issues or their server is inefficient.

IMAP *can* be tedious, if every new message you read involves
reconnecting to the server, negotiating that connection, checking for
new messages, issuing fetch instructions, queuing every action one
after another (i.e. half-baked software written by people who've not
fully thought through how to do it properly, and don't care).

But, it doesn't have to be.  If they'd done things intelligently,
keeping an active connection to the server during your session (only
timing out after a long time), simultaneously handling new message
additions to the lists, while you do what you do, sending commands in
parallel.


-- 
 
uname -rsvp
Linux 3.10.0-1160.53.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 14 13:59:45 UTC 2022 x86_64
 
Boilerplate:  All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.
 
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