Refreshing ancient MIME/IMAP memories

[f***@crowfix.com]

My ISP has temporarily throttled me back to 128Kbps, and viewing email with attachments has become slower. It made me wonder if mutt could be configured to only download the main email and leave the attachments behind, but that's not how attachments work; they are just part of the body. Then I had flashbacks to when I inherited a sorry webmail program 20 years ago and had IMAP so memorized that I could read email with a telnet session, and how much I hated trying to remember what the next sequence number should be.

So I am asking if someone could kindly refresh my memory on exactly what IMAP servers do to email they store. Memory says they do not pre-process messages to break out attachments; that it is not possible for mutt to only download the basic text or html attachments, and leave all the jpg, gif, pdf, doc, and other attachments alone until needed to save on the attachments page. Year of usage have also convinced me that if mutt could save downloading unwanted attachments, it would, so it probably can't; messages are all or nothing. Is that correct?

[Ben Boeckel]

Post by f***@crowfix.com
So I am asking if someone could kindly refresh my memory on exactly
what IMAP servers do to email they store. Memory says they do not
pre-process messages to break out attachments; that it is not possible
for mutt to only download the basic text or html attachments, and
leave all the jpg, gif, pdf, doc, and other attachments alone until
needed to save on the attachments page.

Attachments can be downloaded separately. I don't know if Mutt does it
(I use offlineimap for it), but K-9 on Android doesn't download
attachments automatically (for me). I remember KMail doing similar
things when I used it.

I don't know much more though, sorry.

--Ben

[Richard Z]

Post by f***@crowfix.com
My ISP has temporarily throttled me back to 128Kbps, and viewing email with attachments has become slower. It made me wonder if mutt could be configured to only download the main email and leave the attachments behind, but that's not how attachments work; they are just part of the body. Then I had flashbacks to when I inherited a sorry webmail program 20 years ago and had IMAP so memorized that I could read email with a telnet session, and how much I hated trying to remember what the next sequence number should be.
So I am asking if someone could kindly refresh my memory on exactly what IMAP servers do to email they store. Memory says they do not pre-process messages to break out attachments; that it is not possible for mutt to only download the basic text or html attachments, and leave all the jpg, gif, pdf, doc, and other attachments alone until needed to save on the attachments page. Year of usage have also convinced me that if mutt could save downloading unwanted attachments, it would, so it probably can't; messages are all or nothing. Is that correct?

IMAP can serve you all attachments separately and even chunks of bytes at any
position of the remotely stored email. No idea how to do it with mutt.

Richard