When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”

Re:When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?” by billpg on Monday September 26, 2022 @07:40AM (#32981835)

The UIDL command is specified as an optional command, but it's really required. https://billpg.com/pop3-uidl/

The workload required to poll is heavy. You need to reconnect TCP, TLS and login. Once you find you have no messages, you have start over to check again. https://billpg.com/pop3-commit-refresh/

Clients and servers need to keep a short-term "message id" to long-term "unique-id" map. https://billpg.com/pop3-message-ids/

Deletes are batched and only committed at the end of a connection. Unless you're willing to close and reopen a connection right away, any messages you delete are in a not-quite-deleted limbo until you close the connection. https://billpg.com/pop3-deli/

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Re:When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?” by megous on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @07:39AM (#32994053)

Looks like most of these are issues for large providers only or if you have multiple clients/protocols enabled, which is I guess fair. Thanks for the overview, it's always interesting to see limitations of protocols I use daily.

I use POP3 only to move messages from my mail server's mailbox on a VPS to my LAN using a pull method. Polled mailbox is thus mostly empty or has very few messages at each poll. So it's a nice fit.

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