I've been lurking on this list for a while and monitoring this thread on
and off. Now it is time to uncloak.
A key point in the Unix philosophy is to keep it simple, stupid
(KISS). The Unix way is lots of very stupid little programs, which you can
then glue together in new ways to produce new and varied programs to do
new and varied things. Unix is Legos for applications. This has also
worked incredibly well for Forth, but that's another flame war. :-)
One of Microsft's major problems is that they have not followed this
philosphy. Case in point, they have programs like Outlook and Exchange,
which are: bloated, buggy, horridly insecure, and utterly dependant on
NTisms, and so hard to port. I would hate to see mutt go down the same
road.
Unix, wisely, separates mail functions into Mail Transport Agents (MTAs)
and Mail User Agents (MUAs), or mail readers. They are very different
functions. So, consistent with the Unix philosophy, let's keep them as
different programs.
If someone wants to write an MTA that handles IMAPisms and prepares a mail
file for Mutt's convenience, great. Similarly for POP. But, please, get
the MTA functions out of MUTT and leave it as just an MUA.
On Thu, Dec 09, 1999 at 01:40:18PM -0600, David DeSimone wrote:
-> Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
-> >
-> > I haven't yet encountered an ISP POP3 server that doesn't do TOP.
-> > I've only found one that didn't do UIDL.
->
-> So would you have mutt use, or not use, the TOP command, and the UIDL
-> command?
->
-> > Note that fetchmail quite happily uses "TOP n 999999" instead of "RETR
-> > n" to retrieve e-mail. According to the comments in fetchmail's
-> > pop3.c, this method very rarely fails. (I saw a case recently where
-> > it did fail, but this was because the server had a buggy
-> > implementation of TOP, not because it didn't implement TOP.)
->
--
-- C^2
No windows were crashed in the making of this email.
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