SYNOPSIS

 use Mail::Box::POP3;
 my $folder = new Mail::Box::POP3 folder => $ENV{MAIL}, ...;

See SYNOPSIS in Mail::Box::Net

DESCRIPTION

Maintain a folder which has its messages stored on a remote server. The communication between the client application and the server is implemented using the POP3 protocol. This class uses Mail::Transport::POP3 to hide the transport of information, and focusses solely on the correct handling of messages within a POP3 folder.

See DESCRIPTION in Mail::Box::Net

DETAILS

How POP3 folders work

Rfc1939 defines how POP3 works. POP3 is a really simple protocol to receive messages from a server to a user's client. POP3 is also really limited: it can only be used to fetch messages, but has not many ways to limit the amount of network traffic, like the IMAP4 protocol has.

One POP3 account represents only one folder: there is no way of sub-folders in POP3. POP3 doesn't support writing (except for some message status flags).

This implementation

The protocol specifics are implemented in Mail::Transport::POP3, written by Liz Mattijsen. That module does not use any of the other POP3 modules available on CPAN for the reason that MailBox tries to be smarter: it is capable of re-establishing broken POP3 connection when the server supports UIDs.

The implementation has shown to work with many different POP servers. In the test directory of the distribution, you will find a small server implementation, which is used to test the client.