May Telkom burn!

[Dave A]

Two logical suggestions, thanks. I had to ask local - you raise a problem as ridiculous as this on an international support board and most of them shake their head in disbelief. Even the guys in outer Mongolia connecting via dial-up get an attack of the sniggers.

Here are the concerns with each idea:

But why not change to POP

Not an option on the software itself as this is not a "common" problem. The idea with IMAP is you pull the email headers, but only pull the content as you want/need it. And with fair chunks of the purpose, all you want is the headers. Ironically, given Telkom's seeming aversion to the protocol, using IMAP probably reduces bandwidth across the link

But running with the POP idea, what I would need is a mailserver that runs on Apache and will pull the mail content off the webserver via POP - then make it available for an IMAP call on the local machine - not quite the standard way of behaving as a mailserver. But maybe there's something out there.

go unshaped?

Probably cheaper than getting a local webserver and should solve the problem. My reservation here... well there's a couple.

1. Every time I change something on our Telkom account, Telkom manages to stuff something up that was working before - normally the ID of the header line. (There actually is a valid reason for this. Unfortunately a long story, but I'll tell it if anyone is really curious).
2. Telkom wins with their shaped vs unshaped strategy and they really don't deserve the victory.