Supporting Functions

The List, Retrieve and Delete methods used two private methods, Write and Response, to send and receive messages from the POP3 server.

private void Write(string message)
{
    System.Text.ASCIIEncoding en = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding() ;

    byte[] WriteBuffer = new byte[1024] ;
    WriteBuffer = en.GetBytes(message) ;

    NetworkStream stream = GetStream() ;
    stream.Write(WriteBuffer, 0, WriteBuffer.Length);

    Debug.WriteLine("WRITE:" + message);
}

C# native strings, like Java native strings, are UNICODE. We therefore need to encode and decode the strings to and from ASCII. After encoding the string, we can then retrieve the socket stream by calling the TcpClient.GetStream method. I finish the Write method by called the Debug.Writeline method. This sends the string to the debug stream for help with debugging.

private string Response()
{
    System.Text.ASCIIEncoding enc = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();
    byte[] serverbuff = new Byte[1024];
    NetworkStream stream = GetStream();
    int count = 0;
    while (true)
    {
        byte[] buff = new Byte[2];
        int bytes = stream.Read(buff, 0, 1 );
        if (bytes == 1)
        {
            serverbuff[count] = buff[0];
            count++;

            if (buff[0] == '\n')
            {
                break;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            break;
        };
    };

    string retval = enc.GetString(serverbuff, 0, count );
    Debug.WriteLine("READ:" + retval);
    return retval;
}

The Response method is similar to the Write method accept that we retrieve bytes from the stream before decoding them. Again we call the Debug.WriteLine method to send the read data to the debug stream and help with debugging. Note that we have a limitation in the Response method. We can only retrieve or send up to 1024 bytes at a time. I'll fix this in a later release. If you intend to use this in production, then you'll have to do the same first.