G.I.Josh

I was reading about gmail possibly enabling pop3 so that people can read it like they would an smtp/pop3 email acount. My question is this: Why couldn't you just write a program to use http instead of pop3 to download the email and put it in the folder standard email would go?

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sykkn

slightly offtopic, but ....

Google pop access is available at this time: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about_whatsnew.html

kurifu

Actually it is doable, and has been done, but the problem is that each webmail provider does not have a consistent way or rendering/representing data on the web so you would have to write this service for every single website you wish to support, and to further complicate the matter, everytime the provider changes their website even as much as 1 character (which Google is doing a lot since they are still currently in beta mode) you risk the change of breaking the code which is extracting the data from the service provider.

Also you have to do 1 page load or more to get all the email titles you have, and 1 page load at least for every single message that needs to be downloaded to your inbox... that can be a lot of page loads if it is my mail box and the service providers might notice something like that, not to mention it could be kind of slow

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G.I.Josh

Thanks Kurifu. Makes perfect sense.

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