I got a chance to implement POP3 against the Poorman mailstore this morning. It was pretty much a hack job--I'll refactor it later--but it is a good test of the mailstore's major functions, and it should work fine with any well-behaved POP3 client. All POP3 commands are implemented except TOP and APOP, neither of which are used by my test client (Outlook Express). Performance seems quite good--easily as fast as it needs to be with my 500-message test mailbox.

Next on the to-do list is making the RFC822 header parser ignore parenthesis-style comments, and figuring out how authentication will work. And I have to do some refactoring on the mailstore code, now that the ideas have crystallized in my head. Wasn't it Brooks who said something like "Plan to build it twice; you will anyway"?