Re: movemail

[Paul Eggert]

Tim Cross wrote:
> Do we have any figures on the percentage of users on different platforms
> and of those, how many of them actually need this insecure POP3
> functionality?  I would have thought very few users actually need the
> movemail feature, especially on non-POSIX systems.

I don't know of any figures. Perhaps we could get a feeling for it by having 
Emacs warn the user at runtime if movemail is used in POP mode, as this is quite 
insecure.

> why is an insecure
> pop3 process the only solution or is it really the only solution because
> nobody has put time into a better secure solution?

The latter, in the sense that the "better secure solution" is GNU Mailutils 
(where people have put in the time). Unfortunately GNU Mailutils has not been 
ported to MS-Windows.

At some point I suppose we should make --with-mailutils the default, at least on 
non-MS-Windows hosts that have GNU Mailutils installed.