MBOX-Line: From mrc+imap at panda.com  Mon Oct 31 15:49:34 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Mark Crispin <mrc+imap@panda.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:47 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] BODY.PEEK[section]<origin.size> FETCH response
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Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1110311532190.9034@hsinghsing.panda.com>

On Tue, 1 Nov 2011, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I haven't tested GMail with imaptest for a while now (few years?), but I
> don't think the bugs it reports are about the mailbox model, or anything
> else that can't be fixed somewhat easily.

Sigh, Timo, you had to give away the secret. I was hoping to bait this
trap a bit longer.

Since the cat is out of the bag: there is nothing in the mailbox model
which does not comply with IMAP, or which can not be presented in an
IMAP-compliant manner. IMAP is silent on the mailbox model for a reason.

The problems with Gmail's server are, by and large, flat out bugs. There
are a few design faults; but they are completely unnecessary and could be
amended while keeping the Gmail model.

> I guess the one test I could
> remove is the search for substrings, since even Mark doesn't think it's
> worth the trouble nowadays.

FWIW, I always considered the implementation of string searching to be
implementation dependent. The only requirement was that simple
case-independent substring is recognized as compliant. I never intended
that a server be forbidden from implementing a smarter search (e.g.,
fuzzy) that returns more matching messages.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

