Re: draft-rose-pop3-again-02.txt

[Marshall Rose <[e-mail]>]

I'll let John respond to most of your comments, I'll comment on just a few.

In general, it would be helpful for you to review the draft with respect
to a minimalist philosophy.  The goals are: simplicity and minimal
footprint on the server.  Presumably other protocols will be less
simple and have larger footprints.

> Just for my edification, why doesn't POP3 have an equivalent to the IMAP4
> CAPABILITY command, and why doesn't POP3 have more command completion codes
> than just +OK and -ERR?  I remember being badly beaten up on these sorts of
> issues with IMAP, and am bewildered to see that nothing has been done with
> either with POP.

Simplicity.

> Is -ERR really a ``success indicator''?  [Page 3]

Yes, a success indicator tells you whether you were successful or not.

> ``Hence a multi-line response is terminated with the five octets''... seems to
> be restating the obvious and is confusing in the context of the previous
> sentence.  [Page 3]

Then why did people ask for it?

> Why isn't a server permitted to give
> 	-ERR I can't talk with you now
> as a greeting?  (Equivalent to IMAP4 BYE as a greeting) [Page 4]

Because it is simpler for the server to not accept new connections.

> Page 17 is awfully mealy-mouthed about the message size.  Is it a reliable
> indicator of the RFC822 message size in Internet text format, or isn't it?

Minimal server footprint.