[pmmail-list] Remote control

[Paul Hodges]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2001 15:15:10 +0100 (CET), Frank Winkler @home wrote:

>  Why should the order of the messages change within the mailbox?

Because there is no mailbox!

Demon's original setup was to deliver mail only by SMTP.  As they
grew, they got multiple SMTP servers, any or all of which will
deliver mail when the user logs on.

When they decided to implement POP3 access as an alternative, they
did this by creating a system that requests the contents of the SMTP
queues for each user to synthesize the user's mailbox at the point
that they log on to the POP server.  This request is sent in parallel
to all the SMTP servers, and the results arrive asynchronously at the
POP3 server resulting in a different order of messages each time.

It seemed to me that the best way to handle this would be for the
remote control window to stay logged in while open - but Southsoft
disagreed, with the result that to find the message you marked for
handling during the first login, PMMail has to scan the mailbox
looking for the GUID (it does this by working outwards from the
previous position of the message, in the vain hope that it might be
near - there is actually no relationship).  Unfortunately, it doesn't
cache the message number to GUID mappings (for the duration of the
login) as it finds them, so the scan is repeated tediously again and
again when fetching or deleting several items in a mailbox.

Plenty of scope for easy improvements to the program here!

Paul Hodges
QBS Software Ltd

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