Want More on POP3?
Monday June 9, 2008
Having read the recent guide on accessing POP3 mailboxes with poplib, you may want to know more about the intricacies of the POP3 protocol. If so, you would do well to read through RFC 1725. Put succinctly, an RFC is a document describing the standards that make the Internet work (source). Whenever you learn a new language or a new Python module, it is always best to use the source code of the module to learn what the module is coded to perform. Similarly, the RFC details what an Internet-related technology is supposed to be able to do.
Note that this does not mean that every implementation of the standard implements all that the standard details. But, if an implementation does not include something you need, it is the fault of the implementation and its designers, not the protocol. Also, there is more in RFC 1725 about client-server communications than either the poplib guide or even the Python documentation includes. If you are coding an email client, you would do well to be very familiar with the RFC documentation rather than simply relying on documentation about the module that uses it. There may be something in the RFC that you can use but that
Note that this does not mean that every implementation of the standard implements all that the standard details. But, if an implementation does not include something you need, it is the fault of the implementation and its designers, not the protocol. Also, there is more in RFC 1725 about client-server communications than either the poplib guide or even the Python documentation includes. If you are coding an email client, you would do well to be very familiar with the RFC documentation rather than simply relying on documentation about the module that uses it. There may be something in the RFC that you can use but that
poplib does not implement, in which case you may want to use socket to create your own implementation of that feature.