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RE: State of POP3 in curl?

From: Steve Holme <steve_holme_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:04:13 +0000

Hi Rich,

> I have been watching, with great interest, Steve Holmes's fine efforts to
> round out cURL's POP3 capabilities. I'm curious as to how the effort
goes.

Thank you for your words of encouragement... unfortunately my modifications
have temporarily been put on hold due to other commitments, my birthday and
letting the dust settle allowing myself some time to mule over the input /
feedback I received from everyone here.

> Last I saw was a set of patches, but haven't been able to do much other
> than watch. I presume those have not been landed, if we want to test
> them we'll have to build from source with them applied. Might just get
> there. :)

So far I've had two attempts at implementing the extra commands:

1) As part of the url. For example: --url pop3://mail.domain.com/list/3
would perform a single list on message 3
2) Using the -X command. For Example: --url pop3://mail.domain.com/5 -X TOP
would return the header for message 5

As far as I remember I only posted patches here for the second and it is
this that I'm using in my own code at present.

> Does seem like some implementation details were still being considered
> and I've been mulling over them (despite no time to post.)

I think I've had enough time to mull things over now and I think I
understand all of the points that Dan raised in the last email in the thread
back on the 22nd December ;-)

> Mostly it strikes me as strange ("hokey") to see parameters which aren't
> part of URL passed there.

Fair point...

> (I do understand and agree with wildcard/globbing/sequence numbering
> constructs.) The message number on the URL is not RFC.

True... However, if we remove the message id totally from the URL that will
break any existing apps if and when they upgrade to later versions of
libcurl.

> pop3://mail.example.com -X RETR:1 # retrieve message number 1
> pop3://mail.example.com -X TOP:2:15 # retrieve 1st 15 lines from msg 2
>
> or perhaps with spaces between parms
>
> pop3://mail.example.com -X "RETR 1" # retrieve message number 1
> pop3://mail.example.com -X "TOP 2 15" # retrieve 1st 15 lines from msg 2
>
> Using colon's avoids the need to put quotes around the -X parameters.
> The space separated style does make the commands look like right out of
> the RFC,

Indeed... Though I do think we can support this as well as for example
pop3://mail.example.com/1 to retrieve message 1 as well.

You will have seen that I've posted a bunch of smtp updates this week so now
that they have been pushed and I'm starting to get back into curl hacking I
will pick this up again and see what I can do over the next few days ;-)

Hopefully I will be able to post an update soon.

Kind Regards

Steve

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Received on 2012-02-16