Re: [Evolution] Delete messages on server when deleted locally

[Bill Yohman <evolution designsco com>]

At 12:24 AM 6/3/2003 +0200, guenther wrote:

> > >POP3 is not designed for that, and every mailer I used with similar
> > >functions did not delete those messages (Eudora, Netscape).
> >
> > I'm surprised when I hear that POP3 is not "designed" for something. This
> > really has nothing to do with POP3. POP3 has two methods built-in: 
> leave on
> > server and delete from server.
>
> Sorry, that was my definition of being "designed" for some purpose.

I normally have a negative response when I hear someone use that phrase. 
While it may not be the case in your instance, most of the time it's 
followed with some cop-out as to why that's not the way to do it. I'm not 
really interested in a philosophical discussion about mail clients so this 
turns me off. Judging from your response you don't fall into this category.

> POP3 does _not_ have those methods "built in". POP3 has RETR and TOP to
> fetch a mail and DELE to delete any given mail.
>
> All implementations and especially logic beyond this commands entirely
> is up to the developers. And even those basic commands are broken in
> some POP3 servers, judging from the complaints in here... :-/

This is what I mean by built-in. You can retrieve the messages without 
deleting them or with deleting then. That's what I mean by built-in as it's 
not done by the client as are the things we have been requesting.

> > Anything other than this is trivial
> > programming on the part of the application developer as demonstrated in a
> > number of other mail clients.
>
> Granted, yes -- you can do better even with this very small set of
> commands. But it always will be just some clever workaround.

Most of the things I do on a *nix command line are clever workarounds. 
That's the beauty of the OS design. Believe me, if I could program in C (or 
whatever Evolution uses, I would HAPPILY donate the code to make this happen).

I can understand that other features are more important and I have no 
problem with that. What I don't like is when a developer tells me something 
"wasn't designed that way and you should change over to the why that I 
suggest." That's not his job. He should respond to the marketplace to the 
best of his abilities.

> > I for one prefer POP over IMAP all the time. They only reason I like the
> > concept that Eudora implements is because I only have a couple of systems
> > and they don't need to be synchronized. I like to be able to check my mail
> > from a couple of places without making sure every box has the same info. I
> > have one "primary" system that contains everything I need and I have no
> > need to replicate.
>
> Yep. Again, IMHO POP3 was only designed to fetch mail, not to manage
> your mail on the server and from different places.
>
> At least that is how I interpret chapter 1 of RFC 1939... ;-)

I agree but no one is asking for it to manage the mail. We don't want 
changes we make to a message propagated back to the server. We just want 
more granularity when it comes to the retrieval and deletion of messages. I 
wouldn't suggest that someone create IMAP functionality in a mail client.

Cheers.