Re: Stuff I stumbeled over while writing Gnus-FAQ

[Frank Schmitt <usereplyto@Frank-Schmitt.net>]

kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Frank Schmitt <usereplyto@Frank-Schmitt.net> writes:
>
>> There's often the question "How to prevent Gnus from deleting the Mail
>> on the server it retrieves from my Pop3-server", there's no
>> functionality for this in any version of Gnus, so people have to use
>> either something like fetchmail, or the pop3.el from XEmacs mail-lib,
>> correct? And this pop3.el doesn't work with Gnu Emacs, correct too?
>
> Actually, the XEmacs functionality comes from epop3mail.el by
> Franklin Lee, and I think that works with Emacs, too.

I just did some research about epop3mail.el, but I couldn't really find
a homepage or something alike for this, neither could i get hold of
Franklin Lees email address.

Is there anybody out there who can help me out? Is epop3mail.el still
under active development? 

Is there any reason besides nobody did it yet, why Gnus' pop3.el can't
handle this stuff? Shouldn't it be quite trivial to do? 

You introduce a new keyword for mail-source pop leave-on-server-p which
is nil by default and when the mail shall stay on the server you set it
to t. If pop3.el fetches messages and leave-on-server-p is non-nil, it
retrieves first the uidls for all messages by sending the command 'uidl'
to the server, then it looks in pop3-retrieved-messages (explained later)
which message already have been retrieved, for all others it sends 'retr'
as usual to retrieve them, adds their uidls to
pop3-retrieved-messages and writes a line X-Gnus-Pop-infos:
name.of.server; theUIDL. Then we need a switch at the place where 'dele'
is send to the server which makes pop3.el send this command only if
leave-on-server is nil and finally when a Mail is deleted, we need to
delete it on the server, too.

This should work and allow a per server setting of leave-on-server
(epopmail.el doesn't do this) and for somebody who knows Lisp and the
Gnus sources it should be a triviality to do it.

-- 
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One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.