Subject: [lemonade] VFolder and IMAP extended LIST command

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:39:17 -0500

Cyrus brought up a question of whether it could be damaging (or
resource-wasting, or user-confusing) to have vfolders appear as
"regular" folders in a normal IMAP LIST.  This could cause unaware
clients to download messages multiple times, to present duplicate (and
confusing) views/folders to users, and so on.  One way to address this
-- probably the best way, as the discussion came to -- is to return
vfolders only when requested explicitly, by an extended LIST command
(as defined in the list extensions draft from the imapext group).

Eric and Greg aren't sure that's the right thing.  I'll let them state
their concerns here, but at least one balance is resources on a "fat
client" versus extra bytes sent and received by a mobile client (the
command and the response are each longer for extended LIST than for a
regular LIST).

This post is to start a discussion on this.

Barry

--
Barry Leiba, Pervasive Computing Technology  ([email-masked])
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/leiba
http://www.research.ibm.com/spam

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From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 00:05:21 +0100

Barry Leiba writes:
> "regular" folders in a normal IMAP LIST.

In my experience, this doesn't happen. People don't do that.

Arnt

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From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:24:09 +0000

> In my experience, this doesn't happen. People don't do that.

The discussion was really relating to the specific issue that some 
desktop clients sync all message data in all visible folders, but it 
mutated to cover the more interesting case of whether mobile clients 
seeing the same message in multiple folders could be made to know it 
was the same message.

Dave.
-- 
           You see things; and you say "Why?"
   But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
    - George Bernard Shaw

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From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:50:19 +0100

Dave Cridland writes:
> desktop clients sync all message data in all visible folders, ...

If that's common, I suspect mrc could say something interesting about 
it. His server reports a vast number of mailboxes - every file in my 
home directory or its subdirectories is reported as a mail message. 
8421 "mailboxes" containing hundreds of thousand of "messages".

Arnt