[Dovecot] Question about the pop3 feature "leave messages on server for a certain period of time"

[Charles Marcus]

On 9/11/2009, Axel Luttgens (AxelLuttgens at swing.be) wrote:
> Well, POP is rather well RFC-based too...  ;-)
> In fact, POP and IMAP are both well-defined protocols;
> they just are optimized for each extreme of possible behaviors:
> remove everything from the server as soon as a local copy has been
> taken, or leave everything on the server without taking any local
> copy.

He was talking about the 'leave messages on server' part of POP, which
you conveniently omitted above. Is this aspect of POP 'well-defined' in
the RFCs? This is not a rhetorical question, I really don't know.

> What if user 1 at MUA1 decides to delete some message today? Will
> user 2 on MUA2 still see that message when connecting 10 days later?
> Of course, if user 1 and user 2 happen to be the same user, then that
> user won't be surprised.

Since he obviously wasn't talking about different users, I'm really not
sure why you asked your question.

Multiple users accessing the same IMAP account/folders obviously
requires some thought and planning (and well-defined permissions) to
make work correctly.

> But then neither would he have been surprised if using two distinct
> POP clients.

I cannot count how many times I've had to explain to $user that the fact
that the reason they just had to redownload 5000 messages (for the 3rd
time in a year?) is a good reason NOT to use this option, and that they
should use IMAP.

So, yes, $POPuser can certainly be surprised when this 'feature' of POP
doesn't work as expected.

-- 

Best regards,

Charles