| Stephen Gran on 13 May 2005 02:09:29 -0000 |
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On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 09:48:31PM -0400, Jeff Abrahamson said: > In a private discussion, a flame war erupted concerning the "leave on > server" option that many POP clients offer. The other party > maintained that mail should initially be left on the server in case > something happens to the client. He concluded that this was the > reason for the feature. > > I opined that the feature was likely for use by those who ran more > than one POP client but only wanted one personal mail store. I was > not able to justify this assertion, but suggested (with link to the > rfc) that, since the protocol is stateful, it is unlikely to suffer > from reliability problems that would cause one to loose mail by > issuing DELE's after RETR's. > > Does anyone here know more of the history? I imagine experience with > earlier versions of POP might elucidate this, as web mail clients were > not popular in the old days before the web. The references I can find immediately on google suggest to me that you are both correct, and IMAP came into regular use for both of these reasons. I see references that claim that mail is best handled on a central server (backups, security, etc) and other references that are talking about the problems of off-line management of mail for multiple users/machines and a single account. POP is unlikely to suffer from data loss, judging from the protocol specification, so you are correct there. I think it's mostly that POP was around first, and there are a number of shortcomings in the protocol, including but not limited to the ones you two mention, and these shortcomings lead to IMAP. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | O imitators, you slavish herd! -- | | steve@lobefin.net | Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attachment:
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