Than what? The imap extension is faster and has parsing functionality built in.
True, but the parsing is to be done at a completely different time, and then imap extension can't be >that< much faster, when you consider that my method is doing very little processing, and basically getting the messages as fast as they can download!
Also there's a PEAR Net_POP3 library if you insist on using sockets which handles lots of menial tasks for you.
But where's the fun in that?