Re: Emacs for mail: VM - WL - GNUS

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:59:08 +0100, Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com> 
wrote:
>Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org> writes:
>>On Wed, Nov 24 2010, Elena wrote:
>>> Thank you very much, Jason.  However, my server is a POP one,
>>> otherwise I guess Gnus would not have been dumb enough to start
>>> downloading my mails and deleting them assuming I knew some
>>> bizantine settings to avoid that beforehand.  Thunderbird may be big
>>> and slow, but at least it does not make such assumptions.
>>>
>>> For a text-based mail-client, I'm looking into Alpine now.
>>
>> It has been a long time since I have used a pop3 client, but when I
>> used to support such beasts downloading the messages (and deleting
>> them from the server) is precisely what they were *supposed* to do.
>> I would not be surprised if most modern email clients still
>> downloaded the messages and deleted them from the server when using
>> pop3.
>
> I've never had a POP3 client delete from the server when it reads.
>
> Certainly using Gmail one of the first in your face options is whether
> to retain a copy on the server.
>
> It's a server side setting normally isn't it?

No, it's a client option.  There may be clients out there that default
to "keep" mode, retaining the messages downloaded from POP3 servers.

One should bear in mind though that keeping everything on the server and
re-reading the messages to see what is new puts a *lot* of load on the
server, and may be frowned upon by mail admins.  I believe this is
pretty much why IMAP was invented ;-)