MBOX-Line: From janssen at parc.com  Fri Jan 25 12:30:06 2008
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.com>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:41 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] IMAP servers with no INBOX -- any indicators?
Message-ID: <08Jan25.123007pst."58696"@synergy1.parc.xerox.com>

I'm working on my IMAP server again (finally got STARTTLS working),
and one of the issues I see is that one client, Thunderbird, seems to
stubbornly insist on trying to select the inbox, to which I say "NO",
because I'm exporting a file system, so there's no INBOX.

Here's what's on the wire:

t-bird:  5 select "INBOX"
server:  5 NO SELECT completed

which seems to be the appropriate response.  Thunderbird seems to find
this so surprising that it pops up a message box which the user has to
click through.  I'm wondering if there's some additional flag I should
be passing in, say, the CAPABILITIES response, or perhaps in the
response to the NAMESPACE extension, to indicate to the client that
this is a no-INBOX server?  I should probably change "completed" to
"no such mailbox", I suppose.

Here's the greeting string from my server, in case it's relevant:

* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 NAMESPACE UIDPLUS STARTTLS] UpLib IMAP Server (V4r1) ready.

Bill

