MBOX-Line: From johannes at sipsolutions.net  Thu Jul  6 01:45:06 2006
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:37 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] multifolder notification
Message-ID: <1152175506.4995.51.camel@localhost>

Hi,

A lot of people seem to have a need for being notified as soon as
possible when mail arrives into one of their mail folders as opposed to
just using IDLE on a single one.

I just found draft-melnikov-lemonade-imap-events-00.txt which tries to
give some guide on how to create untagged responses during IDLE for
message store changes in other folders than the currently selected one.

However, I think that this is not enough. Currently, any server can
create such responses and clients must expect them and at least ignore
them. And the server need not send them, in which lies the problem.

Should this be of use to clients, then the server needs to announce to
the client that such multifolder notification is supported.

This can be made arbitrarily complex, ranging from announcing a new
ALLFOLDERNOTIFY capability that guarantees to the client that the server
will always send untagged STATUS responses whenever a mailbox status
changes (except for the one that the client is currently IDLE'ing in, if
any).

Somewhere in the middle of the complexity spectrum there's the option of
using listext to announce a new capability and define a new list option
which indicates which folders are notified for.

And on the upper end you can have a new command that enables/disables
the status updates for any folder, and a new list option indicating
which are selected for status updates (along, of course, with a new
capability telling clients that this is available).

The first option might be problematic since apparently some clients are
in violation of the rules and don't cope with untagged responses well.

In any case, I'm very much interested in having this capability of
notification across folders, but as pointed out it needs to be possible
for the client to tell that it will get such notification in order to
rely on it instead of polling the folders every few minutes.

johannes
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