On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Simon Josefsson wrote: > Every time I am imaginative with IMAP I encounter yet another server > that is buggy, which makes users complain.
You can't do anything about broken servers except advise a change to a non-broken server. UW and Cyrus are non-broken and are freely available. There are non-broken commercial servers as well; even the evil empire has a usable server with modern versions of Exchange. There's no need for anyone to run a broken server. > Compare with your recommendation to compare the number of values > returned in a UID SEARCH UID response with the number of articles in > the mailbox -- coding all these "safety" checks into a client adds > considerably amount of code. I recommended using FETCH instead of SEARCH, since that delivers affirmative correlation data, and hide the bandwidth costs with smarter techniques. > I always have the feeling that all this work > is just because the IMAP protocol is too complex for its purpose. Well, golly gee, Pine and Mulberry use virtually all of IMAP. There is nothing in IMAP which stands out as "nobody uses this, let's remove it." > To illustrate, the uidmax+1:* behaviour > you rely on in the scheme was discussed recently, I think, and people > had different interpretations. The specific problem is with Courier, which is not an IMAP server. Since its author has stated that he wants no part of the IETF process, I don't see any reason to worry about it. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
