MBOX-Line: From tss at iki.fi  Wed Jun 27 07:13:38 2007
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:40 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Namespace separators
In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.0.99.0706250913080.1955@pangtzu.panda.com>
References: <1182783681.3768.187.camel@hurina>
	<alpine.OSX.0.99.0706250816170.1955@pangtzu.panda.com>
	<1182787190.3768.198.camel@hurina>
	<alpine.OSX.0.99.0706250913080.1955@pangtzu.panda.com>
Message-ID: <1182953618.3768.338.camel@hurina>

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 09:45 -0700, Mark Crispin wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jun 2007, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> > I find this # thing also a bit weird. The client can't know about those
> > namespaces without NAMESPACE command, and if it does then there's really
> > no need for # because it can find out the exact prefixes anyway. So why
> > should the client do anything differently if there's #?
> 
> Without a breakout mechanism such as #, then you have the ambiguity 
> problem that you reported in your earlier message.  How do you know that a 
> name is in one namespace as opposed to some other one?
> 
> More importantly, what happens if the different namespaces have different 
> hierarchy semantics; different delimiters, different ways of expressing 
> root, etc.?  Maybe a particular namespace doesn't have hierarchy at all.

NAMESPACE reply returns the prefixes and you can compare those to the
mailbox name. How is a "foo/" prefix any more ambiguous than "#foo/"
prefix?

> > I've understood that many commonly used clients ignore namespaces and
> > only show what is visible with LIST "" *, so I'd want to keep it
> > possible to list contents of all namespaces with it.
> 
> Does your server list all other users' mailboxes with that command (since 
> after all a user may have a public access mailbox)?  Why not?

I was actually going to make it do that, once support for shared
mailboxes is finished.

> Does your server do an "ls -R /" for that command?  Why not?

If user's mailbox root directory is set to /, then yes..

> Assuming that the user has a stupid client that does LIST "" * (a very bad 
> thing to do), 

The "*" wasn't really my point. Let's try again:

I've understood that many commonly used clients ignore namespaces and
only show what is visible with LIST "" %, so I'd want to keep it
possible to list contents of all namespaces with it.

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