[Dovecot] Idea: POP3 deletion as a flag

[Rajesh M]

timo

thank you very much for your wonderful work on dovecot

the new feature that you are thinking about is very useful

this is an excellent solution and is used by a quite a few large isps /
mailing providers like rediff. And i believe blackberry also does
something similar. ie if configure the blackberry today it downloads new
emails only.

when pop3 access emails sometimes in some email clients the emails start
downloading right from the begining. this can be prevented by this
solution

also when there are large mailboxes more the number of emails in the inbox
more the system gets loaded up in scanning the mails and deciding when the
last download took place. i believe pop3 performance would be far better
with this feature.

a few points though

if this option is implemented then there should be a way to disable it
tempoarilry. This is incase the user is shifting over to a new pc and
wants to donwload all old emails.

also we can set the date of download ie say allow pop3 download emails
upto  15 days old/


rajesh


> GMail doesn't delete mails when POP3 client issues a DELE command for it.
> Instead they just become invisible for future POP3 sessions, but they
> still exist for IMAP/webmail. The same could be implemented pretty easily
> for Dovecot:
>
>  - Add a new setting to enable this: pop3_deleted_flag = $POP3Deleted
>  - When DELEting a message, add this flag to the message.
>  - When listing messages, skip all messages that have this flag.
>  - Also hide this flag from IMAP clients(?)
>
> Thoughts? Probably 20 lines of new code.
>
>