Imap header fetching is SLOW!

[Anon]

Hi all,

I tried searching for this but with no luck. Please point me in the right direction if possible.

It seems that with the c-client library and php, the provided imap functions to retrieve the headers only for a pop3 account is very slow. To be more precise it's proportional to the message sizes within the mailbox. I used all the various header retrieval functions but I realized that each one requires a complete download of the message. So if I have like 9 emails that are very short in the mailbox and another one with a 10 meg attachment, the header retrieval increases by 10fold if I have that big attachment.

My question is, why does retrieval of headers need a full download of the message. (my development machine is connected to my isp's pop3 server on a dsl connection and the header retrieval takes exactly as long as it would take for me to download that 10 meg attachment. Shouldn't header retrieval be much much faster than this (in my case about 2-3 mins) which is really unexceptable for a web based email reader.

Any thoughts.

Relevant info:

Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/1.3.23 (Mandrake Linux/4mdk) PHP/4.1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.7 OpenSSL/0.9.6c

IMAP c-Client Version 4.1

[Anon]

The simple answer is that there is no direct command in the POP commands to retrieve just the header.

The only real way to do this is to use the TOP command in POP, but that isn't what the header functions in PHP do.

SHTH
Justin