How Fetchmail made me a spammer

[Benjamin Lutz]

On Thursday 14 January 2010 14:31:12 Programmer In Training wrote:
> A possible solution, but who likes IMAP? I much prefer POP3 and having
> the mail locally (I delete it from the server once it's copied).

Heh, I do, actually. The whole setup is aggregating mails from different 
mail accounts and mailservers outside of my (or this user's) direct 
control, so they can be made available via IMAP, to be perused with any 
client machine from anywhere.

> Also, it seems as if he's downloading it from the other users (the
> person who sent the email) mail server and there is no way to force the
> other mail server to use one standard over another (although in this
> case a useless thought). The problem is it was not able to get into the
> local mail queue because of certain default settings (which at one time
> probably made sense).

Yup, that's how it is. They're making the emails available via POP3, and I 
have to live with it. At least they support more than plain text password 
authentication by now.

> I do think a 20MB email is rather ridiculous. Even with today's age of
> broadband I wouldn't allow files over 10MB and I would make sure my
> users noticed that. I would also have a hard bounce enabled for messages
> that went over the size limit.

Personally, I agree that email is not a particularly efficient means for 
file transfer. I don't see a reason to be draconic about the size though; 
there's enough bandwidth and diskspace available so that allowing large 
emails doesn't have much of an impact with a low volume setup such as mine. 
And everyone else can set up their limits however they like.

Cheers
Benjamin