[Imap-protocol] re: GMail

[Mark Crispin]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Sarah Wilkin wrote:

> Is there a single place that summarizes goals of future IMAP proposals or 

> extensions? I've seen several ideas come up on this list; are these captured 

> publicly anywhere? I don't see anything on http://www.imap.org/, and the 

> ietf-imapext list looks a bit too specific.


IMHO, most of the people who've done IMAP over the years would rather 
curtail further IMAP extensions.  IMAP has too many extensions, and 
although every one has a passionate set of defenders the fact is that most 
clients and servers implement few (if any) of these.  Then there are the 
servers which misimplement extensions (such as Courier doing so for SORT 
and THREAD).

In case someone would like to put together such a list, here is a strawman 
(to throw to the wolves!) of how I would rate the currently published set 
of extensions.  Other people undoubtably have much different opinions and 
will vehemently disagree with this list.

(0) Needed.  Now.  Should drop everything else to address:

 		IMAP internationalization
 		UTF-8 mailbox names
 		UTF-8 flag names

(1) Should go into any major revision (e.g., IMAP5) of the base 
specification, either because it is essential or is "low-hanging fruit" 
that fixes an obvious deficiency:

rfc5051.txt	i;unicode-casemap comparator
rfc2177.txt	IDLE
rfc3502.txt	MULTIAPPEND
rfc4959.txt	SASL-IR
rfc4315.txt	UIDPLUS

(2) Nice to have, not strictly necessary, but for the most part 
low-hanging fruit:

rfc3516.txt	BINARY
rfc3348.txt	CHILDREN
rfc4731.txt	ESEARCH
rfc2088.txt	LITERAL+
rfc3691.txt	UNSELECT

(3) Nice to have, but sometimes misimplemented, and so may not make the 
cut:

rfc2342.txt	NAMESPACE
 		SORT/THREAD (in RFC Editor queue)

(4) Ideas that never really got off the ground for various reasons and 
are likely to fade into obscurity (sorry...):

rfc4314.txt	ACL
rfc4551.txt	CONDSTORE
rfc2971.txt	ID
rfc2221.txt	LOGIN-REFERRALS
rfc2193.txt	MAILBOX-REFERRALS
rfc2087.txt	QUOTA

(5) May become mandatory if IMAP on mobile devices takes off (as opposed 
to being killed), otherwise doomed to category (4):

rfc4469.txt	CATENATE
rfc4978.txt	COMPRESS
rfc4467.txt	URLAUTH
 		convert

(6) Much-discussed ideas that I don't see going anywhere (sorry...) but 
category (4) if they make it to publication:

 		annotations
 		LIST extensions

(7) Everything else bandied about on IMAPEXT, a group that should have 
dissolved years ago...

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.