Re: Emacs for mail: VM - WL - GNUS

[Richard Riley]

Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:

> 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.

It's a server side option too. As I mentioned above you have the option
to retain server side.

>
> 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 ;-)
>

Does POP3 really re-read all retained messages? I cant say I ever saw a
POP3 client freeze on my gmail pop3 connection and there are thousands
of thousands there. That said I now use IMAP/offlineimap.

I thought IMAP was more about dual direction and multi client syncing
- nothing to do with retaining messages as such. Certainly its advisable
to leave emails on the server for obvious reasons. In this day and age
of multiple laptops, PDAs, Smartphones etc, the low price of storage, it
would be ludicrous NOT to keep a central repo of your email. (obviously
filtering and removing spam etc).

Certainly I dont want one client to download email which I am yet to
read and then not be able to pull that email up on another client.