On Sun, 18 Feb 2007, Per Foreby wrote:
mailutil prune INBOX "before 1-jan-2004"
But IMAP2 (and IMAP3) specifies date as "dd-mmm-yy", it is not until 4r1
that date_year is four digits.
IMAP2 did no such thing, although I see how you could be confused by the
ambiguous syntax rules in RFC 1176. The syntax rule for BEFORE was
"string", not "date"; and the only occurance of dd-mmm-yy syntax is in
"date". IMAP2 (like all other IMAP versions) only takes a date
specification in SEARCH and not a date-time.
Furthermore, IMAP4 (RFC 1730) introduced 4-digit years, not IMAP4rev1 (RFC
2060).
However -- and this is important to understand for historical context --
the idea that IMAP2 forced the use of 2-digit years would have been
considered laughable when RFC 1176 was published. It was obvious to
people at the time that of course 4-digit years were permitted, and that
the reference to dd-mmm-yy was just an indication of the general of the
date. Nobody (remember Postel's robustness principle!) would have claimed
otherwise; more signifcantly, every IMAP2 implementation handled 4-digit
years.
Things were very sloppy in the old days. It was only in later years that
the Internet became filled with dogmatic individuals who insisted upon
published syntax that precisely laid out such details.
It's a good thing, too, that things were so sloppy back then. Otherwise
Y2K would have been a much worse problem than it turned out to be. As it
was, most old software handled Y2K just fine.
There is no such thing as IMAP3. RFC 1203 was a fantasy that never should
was published by misrepresentation.
If mailutil uses rfc1176 syntax, maybe the example shold be changed. Or
maybe the rfc reference should be updated to 2060?
mailutil uses IMAP2 search programs. It does not support IMAP4rev1 search
programs, and it won't.
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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