From: P.Peterson@itd.uts.edu.au (Paul Peterson)
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 95 00:41:52 PDT
To: patrick@Verity.COM (Patrick Horgan)
Subject: Re: Netscape 2.0 beta
Message-ID: <v02110102ac9e7e3b993f@[138.25.32.103]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Patrick J. Horgan <patrick@verity.com> wrote:
>Steven Champeon said:
>
>> One thing that I found with the newsreader was that it doesn't
>> do POP correctly. No matter what you do with your mail, it still
>> doesn't check for read vs. unread articles. This is fine when you
>> have a mailbox with one message. It can be annoying when you have
>> 110 messages in your mailbox and don't want to 1) delete them or
>> 2) download them twice.
>
>Neither pop 2 nor pop 3 tell you whether you've read a message or not.

        Eudora can tell whether you've read a message or not by reading the
'status' line of a message. The status line contains an "R" if the message
has been previously read. Eudora uses POP 3 I believe. Elm also uses the
'status' line. The upshot of this is that you can configure Eudora to leave
your mail on the server and next time Eudora goes to read your mail, it
ignores all previously read messages and only downloads the new ones.

>pop 2 does bump up the current number with an ACKS, but if you move around
>with READ n, then that's useless.  pop 3 doesn't do that.
>
>I just reread the rfcs to make sure that I wasn't missing anything,
>(RFC 1725: Post Office Protocol - Version 3, RFC 937: Post Office Protocol -
>Version 2).  Am I missing something?

        This may or may not be a part of the RFC's (I haven't read them)
but this is the way I've always seen it work. So there's no reason that
Netscape couldn't do the same if it can't already. I can't tell yet whether
it's capable or not as I'm still down loading version 2.0b as I type. :-)

Cheers,
Paul P.

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