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This is beautiful. One of the "so obvious it's invisible" truths of the modern age, and I nearly forgot that Eudora and other pioneers of the age were making a
by bdamm 8y ago
This is beautiful. One of the "so obvious it's invisible" truths of the modern age, and I nearly forgot that Eudora and other pioneers of the age were making a somewhat risky choice to only support standard protocols and eschew the proprietary mailers. Most of them are now long dead yet POP3, IMAP, SNMP chug along. At the time, though, it wasn't so clear.
- kps 8y agoEudora also had (has?) UUCP spool support, for those not yet connected to the Internet. I used it that way originally.
- tinus_hn 8y agoPOP3 is horribly inefficient and SNMP is a security disaster waiting to happen. At least POP3 isn’t widely used anymore.
- wila 8y agoMost likely the post you're replying to meant smtp instear of snmp. Makes more sense for a remark about a mail client. I see this typo more often.
- kps 8y agoWhy is POP3 horribly inefficient? Lack of an equivalent to the IMAP COMPRESS extension?
- throwaway76543 8y agoIt's fine if it's used to simply pull down mail to a local spool. The inefficiency complaints usually stem from attempting to maintain mail on a remote server across multiple clients. POP3 does not implement a sufficiently rich protocol to make this possible without downloading the entire spool onto each client. For example, no searching.
- glandium 8y agoNo, it's highly inefficient in the face of latency, because there essentially is no batch fetching primitive. Fetching messages over a high latency connection (e.g. to a server on the other side of Earth) takes forever if you have a lot of messages.
- throwaway76543 8y agoThat's addressed by pipelining (rfc2449, published back in 1998). No batch primitive is necessary if the request/response sequence isn't serialized. The lack of a remote manipulation interface has always been a problem, however.
- tinus_hn 8y agoPOP3 is only efficient if you download all mail to the client and immediately remove it from the server. But nobody does that, everyone leaves their mail on the server. Then everytime you synchronize the server has to go through all the mail it has to see what you don’t have, which is very inefficient if you have 10000 mails in your inbox, like most people have these days. It’s optimized for a usecase that doesn’t exist anymore and it will work in the usecase that does exist while wasting a lot of resources. Truly the worst you can have. It’d be better if it didn’t work at all.
- dspillett 8y agoI don't think it is at all fair to call POP3 inefficient on this basis. It is fine if you use it in the way it is intended (and presumably optimised) for. It was designed as a delivery mechanism back when people didn't tend to have permanent connections and space on servers wasn't cheap. Users wanted mail locally for disconnected use and servers wanted rid of it once delivered onward. Where it is not the right tool for the job, use the tool that is instead (IMAP presumably in this case).
- tinus_hn 8y agoSure, it’s fine if you need to do something nobody wants. Great.
- dspillett 8y agoIt seems that something that doesn't meet your needs (but did match many people's requirements in the past and may still meet some people's needs now) exists is causing you some offence. Have you been "burned" by problems with POP3 in some specific way that has made you feel this bitter towards it rather then using the right tool for a job it presumably isn't right for and moving on? Or are you being forced to use it in some circumstance? > something nobody wants You are not everybody. Just because you can't imagine a valid use case these days does not mean that one does not exist. While IMAP-with-local-caching can replace most use cases for POP3, does it replace all of them in an optimal manner?
- 8y ago
- swasheck 8y agoWait. SNMP or SMTP? I'm legitimately asking and not being pedantic because I'm genuinely curious.
- eitally 8y agoSMTP.