[Users] [Bug 4421] New: (feature request) limit the number of msgs downloaded per session

[noreply at thewildbeast.co.uk]

https://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4421

            Bug ID: 4421
           Summary: (feature request) limit the number of msgs downloaded
                    per session
           Product: Claws Mail
           Version: 3.17.3
          Hardware: PC
                OS: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P3
         Component: POP3
          Assignee: users at lists.claws-mail.org
          Reporter: juhuseq at boximail.com

Fetchmail has a "fetchlimit" option that's quite useful.  If you have an inbox
with 50,000+ messages, it's a bit crazy to download them all at once.  Yet C-M
wants to start doing this immediately after adding an account.  The immediate
download can be inhibited, but eventually users must bite that bullet. 

Rationale for adding a fetch limit option to the "Receive" config page:

1. A massive download can burdon the network for too long (dial-up users are
particularly screwed).  50k msgs would tie up a phone line for days.  If Tor is
used, Tor circuits sometimes collapse mid-session.  I also suspect a heavy
download can trigger a defensive mechanism for a Tor node to kill the
connection.

2. The session is more likely to get interupted (e.g. network goes down) and
recovering can be miserable (some mail clients don't remove from server until
everything is downloaded, causing everything that was downloaded before the
interuption to be redownloaded, sometimes causing many dupes)

3. Testing-- users don't know if their complex configuration with filters &
processing will go well until they actually do a fetch.  We need the 1st fetch
to be small enough that a bad config isn't a colossal disaster.

4. Working around other bugs, such as this one:

  https://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4307

  It might make sense to set a fetch limit to try to prevent a box from
exceeding 505.

5. Some email providers will disrupt users who download too much at once, which
I think is one of the reasons fetchmail introduced the fetchlimit.

6. Security: a Tor circuit that's running for a long time can be exposed by
traffic analysis and timing attacks.

Some filters/processing act differently depending on the age of a message.  So
it would be useful as well if users have a choice in whether the oldest msgs
are fetched 1st or last.

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