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List:       inet-access
Subject:    Re: UIDL?
From:       johnl () iecc ! com (John R !  Levine)
Date:       2001-09-29 2:52:26
[Download RAW message or body]

>Is anyone using Eudora's popper in a big way? It seems to be lightyears
>more memory efficient than the ipop3d that comes in redhat's imap package.

Do you mean qpopper?  It works OK, lots of people use it, but it does
vast amounts of disk I/O, completely recopying the mailbox twice in
each session.  It becomes a problem when a user sets his MUA not to
download messages bigger than some size, then gets some humongous
messages that just stay in the mailbox.  I've had people with
mailboxes that got so large that it took over a minute for qpopper to
start up and MUAs start timing out, leaving dead qpoppers with stale
lock files.

Personally, I use qmail and the courier-imap IMAP and POP servers.
They work well for me.  Multiple simultaneous IMAP and POP sessions or
dropped sessions don't cause trouble since Maildirs don't need to be
locked.  Since each message is in a separate file, it's really easy to
implement a reasonable mail retention policy.  Mine is that unread
mail is deleted after 30 days, read mail is deleted after 90 days,
messages marked deleted are deleted every night.  The implementation
is a three-line shell script using "find".

With response to the original question about the user who wanted to
keep his mailboxes in sync on multiple computers, the answer is to use
IMAP.  That's what it's for, that's what it does, POP can at best do a
feeble imitation.  If he wants to read mail offline, most MUAs can be
told to download copies of all the mail in IMAP mailboxes.






-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, 
Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
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