On Feb 24, 2010, at 2:08 PM, WJCarpenter wrote:
Example:
* I have 100's of sent-mail mailboxes I don't want to be
subscribed to, because it is doubtful I will ever use them. These
mailboxes are unsubscribed because I don't want to see them in any
mailbox listings by default.
This use of subscriptions is a terrible abuse of IMAP. Like most
terrible abuses, it's a-ok to choose for yourself if you're an
advanced user, but anyone who has done support for a broad user
base knows that a client should *NEVER* act like this as the
default. Subscriptions are brittle and non-portable and hiding
mailboxes based on them leads only to floods of "Where is all my
mail you screwed up my life!!!!" interactions.
I'm genuinely confused by this come-back. Could you elaborate?
Why is having subscriptions (and, specifically, some folders to
which you are not subscribed) a terrible abuse of IMAP? What is non-
portable about subscriptions? The IMAP protocol supports them
directly.
Subscriptions themselves aren't an abuse of IMAP, obviously, as they
are in the spec. A client that *by default* uses them to hide folders
is abusing them, for exactly the reasons I explained. They are non-
portable because:
1. The interaction that most (all?) clients poorly bake in between
subscriptions and the "IMAP root" setting means that if your various
clients are not configured identically, you'll see one set of folders
in one place and another set in another. This contributes to users
thinking mail has disappeared to creating mailboxes with the same name
at different paths. The latter is annoying to begin with, but becomes
especially bad when yet another client shows the user both of two same-
name folders and *resolves them in the interface to the same
directory*, so the user thinks they are simple duplicates and deletes
one.
2. Different clients interpolate names differently, such that even if
two clients are identically configured when it comes to the "IMAP
root" and namespaces, they map the subscription to inconsistent paths
(either on the backend or the in the interface). This is especially
true of moving between Thunderbird and certain versions of Outlook and
Vista Mail.
Subscriptions are handy if they're treated more or less like
bookmarks, or if you only ever use one client, and the client doesn't
do anything stupid with them. I can't speak for others, but in a large
university environment that rules out most users with most clients.
-Brian
