[Alpine-info] "Leave mail on server"?

[James Pittman]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010, Eduardo Chappa wrote:


> You can, however, use Alpine to save messages from a POP3 server, so that

> they will be cached locally by using a maildrop.


More importantly, Alpine lets you use an IMAP folder as the destination
for a maildrop. That way, even if your pop3 account doesn't have an IMAP
option, you can still benefit from the benefits of IMAP by 'downloading'
everything from your pop3 server to a different, IMAP server. If you don't
have an IMAP server at all, they're not too difficult to get hold of for
free or a small subscription.

In theory, you could probably set up your other clients to do something
similar. I imagine that in Thunderbird, at least, this would be a case of
setting up a filter that catches all incoming pop3 mail and 'saves' it to
the remote folder on a different server. Not tried this personally, but
from what I remember of Thunderbird's functionality, I don't see why you
shouldn't be able to do this, though it probably wouldn't be quite so
eloquant as in Alpine.

Alternatively, if your pop3 server doesn't have an IMAP option, does it
have a forward option, that would allow you to forward to an account that
is IMAP?