On Aug 18, 2004, at 18:56, Mark Crispin wrote:
Not a good idea. The IMAP protocol is very rigid, and does not permit deviation. Failure to read the IMAP specification closely prior to implementation will result in you having to rewrite your entire application to fix the massive bugs that will result.
Most likely.
On the other hand, even reading the spec doesn't guaranty one from (mis)understanding its finer points.
One way or another, one need to write an implementation at the end of the day. Considering that there is no definitive test suite, I have to take my chance by testing this concrete implementation against a limited set of clients. And even if my implementation appears to behave more or less properly with those selected clients, this doesn't say much about how compliant it is:
"... take a few examples that they find “in the wild” and write code that seems to work based on their limited sample... "
Kind of a quandary.
Sigh.
