Joelsite wrote:
When will you make it so you can use roundcube with pop3? Will it be soon? Please email me when pop3 is supported.
Roundcube will likely never support POP3. You miss out on a lot of features when you switch to POP3, and a lot of those would be difficult to reproduce in a webmail client.
This is probably a horribly incomplete list, but here's a sample:
With POP you get:
- Message list and retrieval
- Rudimentary storage (can leave message in inbox, but that's it)
With IMAP you get that and:
- Complete server-side message storage
- Folders/Subfolders
- Trash folder, Sent folder, etc
- Server-side search
- Server-side sort (supported by most IMAP implementations)
Those things are impossible with POP3 without some sort of externally configured server-based storage (files, db, etc) which would take quite a lot more programming -- so much that it really is not worth the trouble when people are better off using IMAP and leaving those details to the server to figure out. It would also be much slower and bulkier having to also deal with the details of mail storage, indexing, and such on its own. Message searching and sorting would likely be very slow.
Many of the features that people like about RC and other IMAP-only webmail clients are features that are brought to the table by IMAP, not only by the webmail client itself.
For example, check out Ilohamail (from which RC takes its imap library). It does POP3 and IMAP, but in POP3 mode it is really limited.
If there were a POP3 version of RC, it would be but a shadow of itself. It would be missing many features that are just not possible with POP3. Then people would complain about the lack of features in POP3 mode such as "why no folders??" "why isn't it storing my sent items??" and "what happened to my trash folder??" and also "Why is RC so darn slow in POP3 mode??" I imagine there would then be tons of "I switched to RC because of <feature x> but it doesn't work for me in POP3 mode, why?" questions on the lists and in the forums.
Not to mention that if your hosting provider does not support IMAP, it would be unlikely to support all of the server-side features in PHP that would be necessary to recreate much of the functionality provided by IMAP.
In my opinion, it's much better to simply ignore POP3, and only support IMAP. Going down that road would be one giant headache and would only serve to cause more grief for the developers and those helping with support.
If someone wants it bad enough to develop it themselves, I'm sure it would be possible with some sort of IMAP emulation layer which would handle the actual message storage and retrieval. I'm not entirely convinced it would be worth the trouble in the long run, as it would involve coding almost an entire IMAP server.
Jim