[KMnO4]

> and on investigation, it told me that it refused to fetch from a mailbox containing more than 50,000 messages.

Ironically, you would not have this problem with POP3.

[chrismorgan]

… because POP3 isn’t able to leave messages on the server, it’s such a coarse instrument.

You can instruct IMAP fetches to delete too, and that’ll avoid this problem. Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

[knorker]

> Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to tee the emails to another mailbox as they come in, not as they get pulled from the inbox.

[chrismorgan]

Yeah, that’ll have much better support.

[yuubi]

POP3 defines separate retrieve and delete requests. Some servers lose messages when you retrieve them, but I've only seen that misbehavior on major ISPs.