POP3 server?

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Thinking about it more, supporting POP3 would require no
more server storage overhead than running a mlmmj/mailman
instance.

And unlike running mlmmj/mailman, it still goes with the
"pull" model we favor with public-inbox and avoids the
impedance mismatch of NNTP for reading and SMTP for posting.

Users would "login" using the list address and a unique
password they generate themselves.  The password would be
used as a cookie to keep track of which messages the
user has fetched.

All the POP3 server would have to do is keep track of is the
cookie and which message (git commit SHA-1) they've seen in a
key-value store.  The caveat is if the server admin screws up
and loses the key-value DB, then users will see all messages
again :<

The k-v store would probably be SQLite, though, to reduce
installation dependencies since we already (optionally) use
SQLite for Message-ID prefix matching in the WWW interface and
NNTP article number mapping.