MBOX-Line: From tony at att.com  Fri Jul 29 21:36:04 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Tony Hansen <tony@att.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:46 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Where to start?
In-Reply-To: <4DEC1C93.24755.853F5AE5@David.Harris.pmail.gen.nz>
References: <4DEBB242.2090200@BusCom.net>,
	<201106051924.p55JOwpG003543@mxout12.cac.washington.edu>,
	<4DEBDFF5.9000301@BusCom.net>
	<4DEC1C93.24755.853F5AE5@David.Harris.pmail.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <4E338A34.8000400@att.com>

On 6/5/2011 8:17 PM, David Harris wrote:
> The absolute golden rule of IMAP is "read the BNF". It can be tortuous,
> but in over a decade of working with IMAP (and I do not consider
> myself in any way an expert or a model for others), I have never found
> a case where spending the time working my way through the BNF
> maze did not answer a syntactic question, however thorny it might
> have seemed.

The corollary to this statement is: "look at the examples, but only 
consider them to be approximations to what the BNF describes". When in 
doubt, see rule #1: the BNF is king. Until you learn these two rules, 
expect to have weird problems plague your existence when you test under 
a variety of clients.

     Tony Hansen
     tony@att.com

