Testing

I know I haven't posted anything in awhile, but it's not entirely my fault, blogger had a bug last week that prevented me from saving a post I spent a solid 15 minutes composing. I've long since forgotten what it was about, but it just goes to prove you can never have enough testing. Improved testing is another big goal for my team in 2005. Webmail 3.1 has been our most successful release to date from a QA standpoint and is a direct result of the large increase in number of hours spent testing.

Gmail pop server

On a technical note, it might be of some interest to those techies out there that gmail's pop server is not completely following the RFC. From some testing it appears that gmail's pop server will only "list" messages once; after they are retrieved they are removed from the list never to be seen again. This is interesting for a number of reasons, but for email clients the "leave copy on server" functionality almost has no useful purpose.

Also, when you issue a "dele" (delete) command, gmail seems to ignore this command altogether. It says "+OK marked for deletion", but from my testing the message is not deleted.

Not sure if this is a bug, or intended, I couldn't find any mention of it on gmail's site though. Let me know if you can find anything.