MBOX-Line: From mrc at CAC.Washington.EDU  Mon May 21 08:10:32 2007
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:39 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] LIST + STATUS
In-Reply-To: <1179745964.32181.1398.camel@hurina>
References: <1179521035.32181.1029.camel@hurina>
	<Pine.BSO.4.64.0705210402190.19541@skarrin.mho.net>
	<1179745964.32181.1398.camel@hurina>
Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.0.99.0705210757470.8377@pangtzu.panda.com>

On Mon, 21 May 2007, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I'm mostly thinking about these webmails that open a new connection for
> each page refresh,

This is of no concern to me.  Such webmails are broken by design, and need 
to be exterminated.  The fact that such webmails do not work well now is a 
feature.

There are webmails which do NOT open a new connection for each page 
refresh.  Natural selection should be allowed to take its course.

> but it would save a roundtrip with all clients when
> they start up.

The latter is of greater concern, but I fail to see this as a major issue 
especially as it introduces a potentially major performance burden with 
some mail stores.  There is a reason why STATUS does not allow wildcards, 
and it is a terrible idea to move it into LIST.

We are seeing numerous IMAP servers out there, running on major ISPs, 
which do not implement mandatory-to-implement facilities of IMAP because 
it is too costly on the server.

You can NOT push excessive burdens on the server.  I carefully designed 
IMAP to have a balance between server and client requirements, yet the 
history of this community has been to make the server do everything and 
boost the perception of IMAP service as being "too expensive to run".

I find it sadly amusing that most of the recent discussions are about 
esoteric features (ANNOTATE being an egregious example) which will never 
be generally adopted in a world where we can't even count upon SEARCH!

-- 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.

