[Dovecot] POP3 flag updates

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Sun Jun 28 00:35:23 EEST 2009


On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 15:53 +0100, pod wrote:
> Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> writes:
> 
> > Why does Dovecot add \Seen flag for mails that have been RETRed? Does
> > anyone really want to use this feature? I can't remember why I
> > implemented it originally, perhaps it was just "because other servers  do
> > that too". I'm thinking about at least changing  pop3_no_flag_updates=yes
> > to be default.
> 
> Doesn't it just keep things looking consistent for a user if they happen
> to be using both a POP3 client and an IMAP client?

Depends on use case.

> Sound implausible?  Say for normal use they have a desktop configured that
> does POP3 (but doesn't DELE after RETR, obviously) but they are away from
> the desk and use a Web to Mail gateway which happens to be an IMAP client.
> It is presumably considered a nice feature that messages they last POPped
> show up as \Seen in the web interface and consequently stuff that has
> arrived since shows up as not \Seen.  Maybe.

If they're out of their desk, the POP3 client is probably still
downloading the mails all the time and all messages would show up as
\Seen all the time. That's no better than having none of them \Seen.

Maybe a user primarily uses a webmail or IMAP client, and POP3 is just
randomly used. Maybe accidentally, maybe for backups, maybe for checking
mails from their phone that doesn't support IMAP, or whatever..
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