On 9/11/2009, Axel Luttgens (axelluttg...@swing.be) wrote: > Well, POP is rather well RFC-based too... ;-) > In fact, POP and IMAP are both well-defined protocols; > they just are optimized for each extreme of possible behaviors: > remove everything from the server as soon as a local copy has been > taken, or leave everything on the server without taking any local > copy.
He was talking about the 'leave messages on server' part of POP, which you conveniently omitted above. Is this aspect of POP 'well-defined' in the RFCs? This is not a rhetorical question, I really don't know. > What if user 1 at MUA1 decides to delete some message today? Will > user 2 on MUA2 still see that message when connecting 10 days later? > Of course, if user 1 and user 2 happen to be the same user, then that > user won't be surprised. Since he obviously wasn't talking about different users, I'm really not sure why you asked your question. Multiple users accessing the same IMAP account/folders obviously requires some thought and planning (and well-defined permissions) to make work correctly. > But then neither would he have been surprised if using two distinct > POP clients. I cannot count how many times I've had to explain to $user that the fact that the reason they just had to redownload 5000 messages (for the 3rd time in a year?) is a good reason NOT to use this option, and that they should use IMAP. So, yes, $POPuser can certainly be surprised when this 'feature' of POP doesn't work as expected. -- Best regards, Charles
