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A comment on Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for? by KMnO4 on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:36AM (#30346174)
> and on investigation, it told me that it refused to fetch from a mailbox containing more than 50,000 messages.

Ironically, you would not have this problem with POP3.

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Re:Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for? by chrismorgan on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:42AM (#30346257)
… because POP3 isn’t able to leave messages on the server, it’s such a coarse instrument.

You can instruct IMAP fetches to delete too, and that’ll avoid this problem. Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

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Re:Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for? by knorker on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @08:45AM (#30346294)
> Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to tee the emails to another mailbox as they come in, not as they get pulled from the inbox.

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Re:Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for? by chrismorgan on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @09:33AM (#30346911)
Yeah, that’ll have much better support.
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Re:Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for? by yuubi on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @11:11AM (#30348370)
POP3 defines separate retrieve and delete requests. Some servers lose messages when you retrieve them, but I've only seen that misbehavior on major ISPs.
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