Subject: POP & PINE

From: "greg cox;WR3058" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1993 19:48:07 -0800 (PDT)

Is there any type of Post Office Protocol available for use with PINE?

What about an off-line reader?

I would like to be able to dial into a server running PINE, quickly
download my new mail, then hangup, read & reply off-line, and upload
replies the next time I log in to the server.

If PINE can't do this, does anyone have sugestions?

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1993 21:00:21 -0700 (PDT)

> Is there any type of Post Office Protocol available for use with PINE?

Greg,
Pine uses the Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) rather than POP.
IMAP is a functional superset of POP, and offers quite a few advantages.
(For a detailed comparison, see the file "imap.vs.pop" in the /mail
directory of ftp.cac.washington.edu)
 
> What about an off-line reader?

This is a high priority for PC-Pine.  Three things are required: a way to
tell Pine to ignore the fact that the network isn't there, a convenient
way to save all or save new messages from the inbox, and a way to queue
(and later send) outgoing msgs. These won't make it into the upcoming
general release of PC-Pine, but I hope we'll have them done by end of
summer. 
 
> replies the next time I log in to the server.

Close.  Using PC-Pine you would connect to an IMAP server (via SLIP or PPP
for now; maybe via async later) and download msgs of interest for offline
processing. 
 
> If PINE can't do this, does anyone have sugestions? 

Most POP clients support this paradigm, although the mail is typically 
deleted from the server after you've downloaded it, which is not always 
what you want, and POP is an all-or-nothing protocol; there is no 
mechanism for selective download.

The best disconnected operation support is currently provided by PC-MAIL,
which uses the DMSP protocol.  It provides for resynchronization of the
local message cache with the state of the server.  As part of the IETF
standardization work on IMAP, this type of functionality will be added to
IMAP. 

Hope this helps...

-teg