RFC 1082 (rfc1082) - Page 2 of 11
Post Office Protocol: Version 3: Extended service offerings
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1082 POP3 Extended Service November 1988 o Typically, each subscription address is not a person's private maildrop, but a system-wide maildrop, which can be accessed by more than one user. This has several advantages: - Only a single copy of each message need traverse the net for a given site (which may contain several local hosts). This conserves bandwidth and cycles. - Only a single copy of each message need reside on each subscribing host. This conserves disk space. - The private maildrop for each user is not cluttered with discussion group mail. Despite this optimization of resources, further economy can be achieved at sites with more than one host. Typically, sites with more than one host either: 1. Replicate discussion group mail on each host. This results in literally gigabytes of disk space committed to unnecessarily store redundant information. 2. Keep discussion group mail on one host and give all users a login on that host (in addition to any other logins they may have). This is usually a gross inconvenience for users who work on other hosts, or a burden to users who are forced to work on that host. As discussed in [RFC 1081], the problem of giving workstations dynamic access to mail from a mailbox server has been explored in great detail (originally there was [RFC 918], this prompted the author to write [RFC 1081], independently of this [RFC 918] was upgraded to [RFC 937]). A natural solution to the problem outlined above is to keep discussion group mail on a mailbox server at each site and permit different hosts at that site to employ the POP3 to access discussion group mail. If implemented properly, this avoids the problems of both strategies outlined above. ASIDE: It might be noted that a good distributed filesystem could also solve this problem. Sadly, "good" distributed filesystems, which do not suffer unacceptable response time for interactive use, are few and far between these days! Given this motivation, now let's consider discussion groups, both in general and from the point of view of a user agent. Following this, extensions to the POP3 defined in [RFC 1081] are presented. Finally, some additional policy details are discussed along with some initial experiences. Rose
