Project: POP3 Email using .Net

Introduction

The .NET framework 2.0 has revamped the support of email sending with improved SMTP classes, but receiving emails is still missing. There are various articles on CodeProject for POP3 support, but all have some drawbacks such as

• some code is not managed
• use of DLLs without .NET source code
• too limited functionality and error reporting
• no tracing of server commands and responses
• no support for SSL
• no XML documentation, etc.

This project builds on the previous projects, but is written entirely in C# 2.0. The present first article focuses on the downloading of raw emails from a POP3 server (RFC1939). There are methods to connect to a POP3 server, to get a list of available emails, to request some emails, to delete some emails and to disconnect. For debugging and for professional use, extensive error reporting and communication tracing is provided. A future article will decompose the received raw email into body, alternative views and attachments following the MIME specification.

I used Gmail for testing, which is freely available for anyone (recommended).

Download here