MBOX-Line: From lyndon at orthanc.ca  Wed Jun 16 18:51:10 2010
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:44 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] COPY v. QUOTA
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1006161833050.38002@legolas.orthanc.ca>

I seem to recall the expressed motivation for MOVE was to work around 
failure of COPY when the target mailbox was at its quota limit. What I 
can't figure out is how this is useful in the real world. Presumably it 
only serves a purpose when the source and destination mailboxes are under 
the same QUOTAROOT. So while MOVE allows messages to be shuffled amongst 
folders under that root, it doesn't allow the introduction of new 
messages.

I'm finding it very difficult to believe that this is such a common 
scenario that it warrants an extension to the protocol. Especially when 
the workaround is as simple as deleting a couple of messages, or bumping 
the quota up a bit. And once you've hit the limit you are going to have to 
do one or both of the above to carry on anyway.

Furthermore, the more I look at this the harder I'm finding it to imagine 
a reasonable server implementation capable of implementing MOVE that could 
not also provide a COPY operation that would not increase the quota usage 
for the QUOTAROOT for a COPY operation within that root. Note that I said 
"reasonable." Anyone can come up with examples of intractable environments 
where it can't be done, but I don't consider someone's insistence on, say, 
implementing their store on a FAT filesystem as justification for a 
protocol workaround for a bad engineering decision.

--lyndon


