Analysis: Typical POP3

• User logout

• If any messages are being retained

  • Re-lock mailbox
  • If mailbox not empty

    • Append new messages to temp file
    • Truncate mailbox
  • Merge retained temp file contents onto mailbox
  • Unlock mailbox

• Delete temp file

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Does this sound like a lot of operations to you? Well, many of those operations are synchronous meta-data operations, and therefore exceedingly expensive to incur on a mail server.