On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Timo Sirainen wrote: > Wasn't IMAP supposed to work with existing mail stores? How exactly do you do > this with maildir or mbox? Or anything else than mbx and other formats > explicitly designed for IMAP?
When IMAP was designed, neither maildir nor mbx existed. It was designed on TOPS-20, not UNIX. The mailbox format on that system permitted shared access, but not shared expunge. When IMAP was first brought on to UNIX, I was told by all of the "UNIX experts" that shared write access was impossible on UNIX, that IMAP was broken for talking shared access, and that IMAP should be changed to represent the realities of UNIX. You should be grateful that I choose to disregard that advice. Indeed, the traditional UNIX mailbox format makes shared access very difficult. UW imapd doesn't even try. A commercial server does, by having a monolithic IMAP server that uses threads and uses inter-thread communication to do shared semantics. > UW-IMAP's solution to unexpectedly changing mbox is BYE. UW imapd does not allow shared access to traditional UNIX mailbox format mailboxes; it only permits single access. So unexpected changes should not happen in that format. UW imapd supports other formats which permit shared access. These formats all do shared read/write, and some (e.g. mbx) does shared expunge. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
