On Tuesday, 07 December 1999 at 09:10, Chris Green wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 10:30:38AM +0200, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> > > That's really the main reason that Mutt's POP3 support is so lame:
> > > Because fetchmail does it better, so there's no point in doing all the
> > > work to improve Mutt's support.
> >
> > Fetchmail is not interactive. Mutt could use this advantage over
> > fetchmail. If it doesn't, I do not see reasons for POP3 client in Mutt
> > at all.
> >
> Yes, this is exactly my original point, there are situations where one
> wants to _interactively_ decide whether to download and/or delete mail
> from a POP3 server. No combination of fetchmail/procmail can do this.
yes, but fetchmail is now a rather large and complex program, implying
that incorporating even fetchmail's features into mutt makes a big
bloated mess.
Another alternative is to add some small features to fetchmail where
you could pass a flag requesting particular messages be recalled or
deleted by number, or requesting just headers on a given run. I
actually discussed this with Eric Raymond (fetchmail's author)
specifically in the context of making a more powerful POP backend for
MUAs, and he seemed to really like the idea. This was about a month
ago - but I haven't been working on it since I've been working on mutt
and school instead.
If fetchmail had these features, then we could chuck mutt's native POP
support in favour of a nice fetchmail interface and everyone would be
happy :)
> There are now a few Unix MUAs which handle POP3 mail quite nicely
> giving the user an interface which makes the POP3 mailbox appear as
> much as possible like an IMAP4 or local one. Headers are displayed
> and one can then delete, view, etc. as required. This *can't* be done
> using fetchmail/procmail. (e.g. tkrat, mahogany and others)
yes, but it might be better to add some code to fetchmail (which all
mailers could use), than to add it to mutt.
> Fetchmail I believe handles IMAP4 mailboxes quite well, why not
> advocate that fetching IMAP4 mail isn't mutt's job either?
fetchmail doesn't handle IMAP4 mailboxes well. It can download mail
from your INBOX to your spool. That's it. Is that what you want?
--
Brendan Cully <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | OLD SKOOL ROOLZ
"I'll level with you: | .-_|\
Please let me on your show, I'd | / \
Like a day off school" | Perth ->*.--._/
