Re: POP3 behavior on broken tcp connection

["Michael S. Shappe" <[e-mail]>]

Assuming that the gates are now open.... :-)

At 11:40 AM 5/24/94, John Gardiner Myers wrote:
>Mark Crispin <[e-mail]> writes:
>>       A related issue comes up in terms of what happens if the TCP connection
>> breaks before a QUIT is received.  Are deleted messages purged?
[...]
>Marshall Rose <[e-mail]> writes:
>> I think that if the TCP connection breaks before a QUIT is received,
>> that the session doesn't enter the UPDATE state and that deleted
>> messages are not purged.
[...]
>The following sentence in the various drafts could be interpreted to
>say a session enters the UPDATE state upon a broken TCP connection:
>
>   When the client has
>   finished its transactions, the session enters the UPDATE state.

Berkeley Popper 1.831, out of the box, leaves things in its working space
until it gets an explicit QUIT (that is, the session is ended cleanly). We
consider this a feature, here, because many of our users use floppy disks,
which are notoriously unreliable, unfortunately. If someone's floppy
crashes while they're collecting mail, thus also crashing the connection,
deleting the spool would definitely qualify as having been the Wrong
Thing(tm) to do.

--
Michael Scott Shappe
CIT Collaboration Systems
"Me? I'm just a lawnmower. You can tell me by the way I walk."
        -- Genesis, "I Know What I Like", _Selling England by the Pound_