Scanner for pop mail servers

Discussion of features in Mozilla Thunderbird
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Anne
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Joined: May 7th, 2003, 8:00 pm

Scanner for pop mail servers

Post by Anne »

I've just downloaded Thunderbird after trying (and loving!) Phoenix browser. My main concern so far (and I'm only just starting to look at it) is the lack of a pop mail scanner to be able to check what's on the mail server before it's downloaded. I'm a long-term The Bat! e-mail user and this was the feature more than any that took me to The Bat!

If Thunderbird had this included I feel that it'd be able to really compete well in the free e-mail arena and attract users away from Outlook Express. Thunderbird is certainly a nice clean, simple to use interface and having the option to create mail and news accounts would really appeal to OE users. They'd benefit from not having all the security loopholes that OE possesses and through which so many viruses are spread, and have a built-in mail scanner to be able to dump spam and other suspicious mails rather than download them.
Cheers,
Anne
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XandreX
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Re: Scanner for pop mail servers

Post by XandreX »

Anne wrote:My main concern so far is the lack of a pop mail scanner to be able to check what's on the mail server before it's downloaded.
Can you be more specific about "what's on the mail server" ? You can chose in the server settings not to download automatically new messages. That enables you to see that there are new messages, but not download them unless you ask for download.
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old Neil Parks
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Re: Scanner for pop mail servers

Post by old Neil Parks »

XandreX wrote:
Anne wrote:My main concern so far is the lack of a pop mail scanner to be able to check what's on the mail server before it's downloaded.
Can you be more specific about "what's on the mail server" ? You can chose in the server settings not to download automatically new messages. That enables you to see that there are new messages, but not download them unless you ask for download.


I suspect she's looking for a feature similar to the "selective download" in Pegasus. With that option, you see just an index of all msgs (sender name, subject, etc), and you can tag individual msgs to fetch and/or delete.
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David James
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Re: Scanner for pop mail servers

Post by David James »

Anne wrote: My main concern so far (and I'm only just starting to look at it) is the lack of a pop mail scanner to be able to check what's on the mail server before it's downloaded. I'm a long-term The Bat! e-mail user and this was the feature more than any that took me to The Bat!


This feature is actually a bit of a fiction. The very act of "checking what's on the server" involves the downloading of message headers at the very least. If a program is installed on your computer, it can only run on your computer. Checking what's on a server would entail running on the server, and that's not happening. It can't check at a distance - it has to download something first. Chances are that The Bat! downloads headers first and allows decisions of whether or not to download the rest of the message based on that. Whether or not this offers a bandwidth savings depends on whether the headers are downloaded again when the rest of the message is downloaded.

This might be a worthwhile feature but its use in, say, deleting spam would probably negate the effectiveness of the junk mail filters in TB which run on message content if I'm not mistaken. What that means is that you manually delete spam on the server rather than downloading it and letting TB's Junk filter deal with it automatically.
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