Re: POP3 critical problem

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed, 20 June 18:58 Jonas Anden wrote:
| Just thought of something; In the name of the unix KISS philosophy,
| why should balsa handle POP3 at all?

Using external programs as agents to handle protocols does not
simplify anything at all!

Ultimately any application wishing to use another program to handle a
protocol must interface to the program in some way and specify the
protocol actions to be taken on its behalf.  In short you now need a
protocol for the two programs to communicate with each other.  When
this sort of thing happens, ad-hoc protocols are invented to meet this
need.

Worse still, the program interfacing your application to a protocol
is, in fact, a gateway.  Functionality is always lost at gateways.

The sendmail interface for submitting mail is just such a protocol,
the Berkeley mbox file format is another example of the genre.
These protocols are non standard and inflexible (consider the
problems MTA authors have making their programs implement the
sendmail interface) and generally restrict a program's ability to
use protocol features.

A much better approach is to implement an API to interface an
application directly to the protocols it uses.  This retains
full flexibility, interoperability and standards compliance.

Brian