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textbrowser / lettera

Love your e-mail.
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Feature: add POP3 support. #3

Open Leif-W opened 4 years ago

Leif-W commented 4 years ago

I've tried using IMAP many times over the past 20+ years. I despise it. Furthermore, despise Gmail's available options and other clients' implementations. Now, I will only ever use POP3.

Conceptually, IMAP seems like a great idea to reduce bandwith consumption and allow multiple client access. But I do not care about either design goal. I want to store mail locally and delete remotely. POP3 allows that, IMAP does not.

Anyways, this is not a debate, just a description of a use case. This is a feature request to accommodate accessibility via POP3 for those who may only want to use POP3 or whose mail provider may only support POP3 or whose IMAP implementation is buggy or otherwise undesirable.

I'll have to look closer at the JavaMail library or something?

textbrowser commented 4 years ago

Yes, I think JavaMail has a POP3 interface. Will add it slowly.

Leif-W commented 4 years ago

I was looking up JavaMail. Apparently it moved from Oracle to GitHub and then to Eclipse where it is now known as Jakarta Mail (v1.6.4 latest at time of writing). There is support for POP3 but also note that Oauth2 is required by Google Mail to avoid being labelled as an insecure mail client which Google will use to bombard all users of "competing" mail apps with email warnings to spread FUD about using anything non-Google. However, while it may not entirely eliminate such user harassment, properly using Oauth2 as Google describes may minimize both the chances and frequency of FUD emails.

https://javaee.github.io/javamail/OAuth2 https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/xoauth2-protocol

Google's documentation is inconsistent and incomplete regarding Oauth2 with POP3. Some of the documentation implies that it only works with IMAP, based only on a lack of mention of POP3. Other pages such as this (above), despite lack of pop3 in the URL, do explicitly mention POP3 use at the bottom. Some people report inconsistent results based upon how old the GMail account is or if IMAP was ever used on the account. More of Google's interference and FUD with competing clients, or possibly just incompetence or lack of interest or concern to fix bugs.

textbrowser commented 4 years ago

I've encountered problems with GMail and IMAP in Spot-On. It was functional at some point and recently I had to modify it because I could not retrieve the latest e-mails based on UIDs (UIDs, per specification, are unique and increasing in value). The resolution is to perform an examination of the INBOX to retrieve some values and prepare a future query using those values. POP3 works well in SO. However, if one is to download e-mail using IMAP and then switch to using POP3 (within the same account), there are some anomalies. Namely, there may be duplicate letters downloaded. The change may also cause state problems in the account.

Google and Yahoo! both offer poor IMAP and POP3 interfaces. E-mail protocols in general are very difficult to work with for many reasons.

Leif-W commented 4 years ago

Microsoft Outlook Webmail, previouly Microsoft Live Hotmail, previously MSN Hotmail, previously Hotmail, is the 3rd of the big 3 free email providers in the US. They also provide both POP3 and IMAP access with Oauth(1/2?). I was not aware Yahoo! provided free POP3 or IMAP service. On Microsoft and Yahoo!, these both used to be paid features only. GMail was the first to provide fully free rich features like this. I am not sure what Spectrum uses for their accounts. Charter used to use some rather foul (extremely buggy) mail server software called CommuniGate Pro or something. Not sure what other major ISPs currently use, where to get such info, or how to test, or how to collect such info. Perhaps an idea for another time.