MBOX-Line: From imap at maclean.com  Wed Apr 30 06:28:51 2014
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Pete Maclean <imap@maclean.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:52 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] FETCH order
In-Reply-To: <14D026C7F297AD44AC82578DD818CDD0344BC64F31@TUS1XCHEVSPIN35
	.SYMC.SYMANTEC.COM>
References: <201404292317.s3TNHSVi029561@mxout12.cac.washington.edu>
	<14D026C7F297AD44AC82578DD818CDD0344BC64F31@TUS1XCHEVSPIN35.SYMC.SYMANTEC.COM>
Message-ID: <mailman.18.1528486492.22076.imap-protocol@mailman13.u.washington.edu>

Hi Neil,

That helps a lot.  Indeed it is highly comforting.  Thank you!

Pete

At 07:46 PM 4/29/2014, Neil Hunsperger wrote:
>Hi Pete,
>
>Symantec Desktop Email Encryption's IMAP proxy reorders the FETCH 
>results that it returns to Windows and Mac IMAP clients to allow for 
>more efficient batching of decryption. The product has worked this 
>way for 6 or so years and I've heard no issues caused by the re-ordering.
>
>I hope this helps,
>-Neil
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Imap-protocol 
>[mailto:imap-protocol-bounces@mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf 
>Of Pete Maclean
>Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 4:17 PM
>To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
>Subject: [Imap-protocol] FETCH order
>
>I am working with a customer that wants some changes made to my IMAP
>server to optimize the FETCHing of batches of full messages (such as
>during mailbox syncs).  Currently the server always returns messages
>in ascending order by UID/MSN irrespective of the order in the FETCH
>command.  In the case of this customer, messages have to be retrieved
>internally from one or more back ends and the time required to do
>this can vary considerably from message to message.  We want to
>pipeline this retrieval so that those messages that can be retrieved
>most quickly are returned to the client first.  The result would be
>that the client would receive the messages in an apparently random order.
>
>It is very clear that this is permitted by IMAP.  It seems in the
>spirit of the protocol and there is some text in the definition of
>"sequence-set" that makes it explicit (although the way it is
>expressed could be much improved).  However this leaves us with one
>concern.  We observe that there exist clients that appear to only
>ever send FETCH commands with sequence sets in ascending order and we
>wonder if any of these would get messed up if they are sent the
>message data in a different order.  Does anyone have any experience with this?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Pete Maclean
>
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