Recent diary entries
Recent diary entries:
2 Jul 2008 fab »
faster pop3 client ?Retrieving a bunch of small emails with a POP3 or IMAP client over a slow network can really be a pain, especially when the latency is high. Why ? Because the IMAP and the POP3 protocol dialog is often serialized between the client and the server, and each processed message requires to send and to receive at least three messages : ask for the header, wait for the reply, ask the the body, wait for the reply, ask to update the seen and deleted flag on the server, and wait for the reply. If the body of the message is small, most of the time is spent waiting for the replies from the server, while the network pipe remains idle. Not really optimal.
Recently, I discovered retchmail, that provides a nice speedup in POP3 retrieval, compared to fetchmail, that I used before. This program uses the WvStreams library, it pipelines and parallelizes most of the protocol dialog. Several POP3 servers can be queried simultaneously, and several messages are retrieved in parallel, so the network is busy most of the time.