A recent project here at the Port sent me looking for a .NET Pop3 client.  It turns out that for what I needed, I couldn't really see purchasing a full blown Pop3 component.  I just needed simple Pop3 email message retrieval.

As an aside, I often find myself weighing the benefits of purchasing vs. rolling my own components. I know all about the dangers of rolling your own.  There are some things that definitely have the complexity to merit purchasing.  Report generation, charting, tree controls are just a few things that come to mind.  But, what if what you need to do is very very simple?  What if you're on a budget? You'd never purchase a component that manages file IO within your code, would you?  It turns out that the Pop3 spec is very simple. In fact, there's only about 10 commands total. 

So, rather than purchase a component that did Pop3, I coded one.  Not before I did some research.  The component I came up with borrows heavily from this article here from Duncan Mackenzie at MSDN.  His example is in VB (FreePop3 is C#) so there was some porting to do, as well as some additional coding, and some polishing here and there.

It needs a few things, most lacking is the message that is returned.  I only added the To, From, Subject and Message fields. I've created a GDN workspace for the project here.  If you'd like to lend a hand, I'd welcome any help!

Brendan