On 9/11/2009, Axel Luttgens (AxelLuttgens@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.
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Best regards,
Charles