How to delete unwanted email without downloading it?

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Josef Lowder wrote:

> In the ongoing (endless) battle against spam, I am trying to create filters 
> to block as much of this garbage as possible, but I can't figure out how to 
> get the Kmail "Configure POP filters" to  "Delete mail from server" without 
> downloading it from my email service provider to my system. 
> 
> What am I doing wrong? 
> 
> I choose "Match any of the following" select "Subject" and "contains" 
> and enter a word or phrase such as "microcap" or "Small Stocks" and for 
> the filter action, I choose "Delete mail from server", then click 
> "Apply" and "OK" ... but this does not stop the identified subjects from 
> being downloaded to my system.
> 
> Why? 
> 
> How can I get this to work? 

Sorry I do not know why your filtering does not work. I am only answering 
your question about why it is downloaded.

POP3 knows nothing about headers.

POP3 knows nothing about the content of the individual messages.

If anything is filtering mail on the remote mail server, it is not POP3.

I have not heard of any technology like this -- where you use a email 
user agent (like kmail) to configure filters to be ran on the remote 
server. I guess it is possible, but it would require the remote server to 
provide the service to do that (and again that is not POP3).

The basic standard usage of POP3 is:

- authenticate
- list emails by number and size
- list emails with some unique hash representing each email (which the 
  client records so it can remember not to download that specific message 
  again)
- delete email (by number provided by POP3 server) one at a time,
- retrieve the headers plus selectable amount of lines starting from 
  top of email (one message at a time)
- retrieve an email (again one at a time)

I searched google and found:

  Download Filters
  http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdepim/kmail/popfilters.html

It is informative.

Note that it must download something to filter it.


 Jeremy C. Reed

p.s. I sometimes maintain vm-pop3d :)