MBOX-Line: From leiba at watson.ibm.com  Thu Feb 21 12:37:06 2008
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Barry Leiba <leiba@watson.ibm.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:41 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] SEARCH SUBJECT
In-Reply-To: <1203623023.4901.242.camel@hurina>
References: <1203623023.4901.242.camel@hurina>
Message-ID: <47BDE0F2.4070704@watson.ibm.com>

My opinion is that most searches are user-originated.  A few, like flag 
searches, are used in server processes (to discover all the unseen 
messages, for instance, or to limit retrieval to a certain date 
threshold), but most are user-originated.  Because of that, the point is 
more to do what's likely to make users happy, to give them what they 
expect... than it is to exactly match some picky spec.

Therefore, I'd say that any server that normalized white space in a text 
search would be doing everyone a favour, whether or not it's 
to-the-letter "compliant" to anything.  The same for a search that 
spanned "lines" (CRLF boundaries), treated email addresses 
intelligently, or normalized parts of speech or conjugations (treating 
"swim", "swims", and "swam" as the same word, say).

None of that sort of thing is likely to have any interoperability 
effect.  It's just likely to help users find what they're looking for.

Barry

