POP3 "LAST" command

[David Carter]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of migrating from the UW IMAP and POP servers to Cyrus.

One of my fetchmail users has picked up an inconsistency in the way that
the two POP servers handle the POP3 LAST command. The LAST command appears
to be obsolete, but is still fetchmail's default mode of operation for
leave mail on server if it available on the server...

It looks like the UW server hooks into the \Seen message state used by its
companion IMAP server, while the Cyrus POP server does not. Consequently,
the information presented by "LAST" has meaning across login sessions for
the UW server but not for Cyrus which always responses:

  C:  LAST
  S:  +OK 0

right after authentication takes place.

Is there a particular reason for the difference in behaviour? I couldn't
find anything in the info-cyrus list archives.

Any other suggestions? The fetchmail manual page says:

  "Under POP3, blame RFC1725. That version of the POP3 protocol
   specification removed the LAST command, and some POP servers follow it
   (you can verify this by invoking fetchmail -v to the mailserver and
   watching the response to LAST early in the query).  The fetchmail
   code tries to compensate by using POP3's UID feature, ...

which implies that fetchmail automatically falls back to using UIDL if
LAST isn't available. Are there likely to be nasty consequences of just
disabling the LAST command in pop3d.c? At the moment it looks like any POP
clients which are configured to use LAST rather than UIDL will download
all of the messages at each poll interval which is rather undesirable.

-- 
David Carter                             Email: David.Carter at ucs.cam.ac.uk
University Computing Service,            Phone: (01223) 334502
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street,       Fax:   (01223) 334679
Cambridge UK. CB2 3QH.