On Fri, 31 May 2002, Paul Smith wrote:
> (It doesn't actually seem to explicitly say what '10:20' means either...
> (as far as I can see). It means 'messages 10 to 20 inclusive' (I hope...),
> but I can't see anywhere it says this it wouldn't be impossible for
> someone to interpret it to mean '20 messages from 10 onwards (ie 10->29
> inclusive)' or even something else. The RFC says "colon delimits between
> two numbers inclusive." which doesn't seem like English to me, and is vague
> about what those 'numbers' mean.... :-) )
About a dozen lines above what you just quoted, the grammar says:
sequence_num ::= nz_number / "*"
;; * is the largest number in use. For message
;; sequence numbers, it is the number of messages
;; in the mailbox. For unique identifiers, it is
;; the unique identifier of the last message in
;; the mailbox.
set ::= sequence_num / (sequence_num ":" sequence_num) /
(set "," set)
That's neither "open to interpretation" nor "vague about what those
'numbers' mean." And if that weren't enough, the example right after what
you quoted should make it pretty obvious:
;; Example: 2,4:7,9,12:* is 2,4,5,6,7,9,12,13,
;; 14,15 for a mailbox with 15 messages.
There are some easily misinterpreted bits of the IMAP4 spec, but this is
not one of them.
