MBOX-Line: From arnt at gulbrandsen.priv.no  Wed Apr  8 01:05:28 2015
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt@gulbrandsen.priv.no>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:54 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] SEARCH semantics
In-Reply-To: <55246A71.27553.323D151D@David.Harris.pmail.gen.nz>
References: <55246A71.27553.323D151D@David.Harris.pmail.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <c94a9300-489f-4fca-87e6-992ccc1221e8@gulbrandsen.priv.no>

David Harris writes:
> 3: The following search is valid, according to the syntax in RFC3501:
>
>    xx SEARCH OR OR <exp1> <exp2> <exp3>
>
> and allows an OR expression to cover three terms instead of 
> just two. As such, it 
> seems quite useful, but it would certainly have mystified my 
> old search code (it was 
> rubbish, as I've pointed out), and I was wondering how 
> generally safe it would be to 
> use this type of expression?

I've seen this kind of thing many times, e.g. OR OR FROM x TO x CC x, and I 
think it's fairly widely used. IIRC the Symantec IMAP proxy uses nested ORs 
en masse.

I agree about the vagueness with regard to searching. My best advice is to 
do what seems useful to users, and make searching inclusive rather than 
exact.

Arnt