[Imap-protocol] IMAP MOVE extension

[Mark Crispin]

On Sat, 12 Jun 2010, Witold Kręcicki wrote:

> You are silently assuming that all of pine/alpine users were using IMAP.

> I was using pine, then alpine myself but I have never used IMAP in it,

> only local mailboxes.


After the early 1990s, the many tens of thousands of users at UW were all
IMAP users, not local file users.  Nor was UW the only institution which
configured its email infrastructure in that way.

Furthermore, you are making a false dichotomy.

The same engine (literally) used by Pine for local mailboxes was also in
the UW IMAP server.  There was no difference in Pine between a local
mailbox operation and an IMAP operation in the user interface.  The Pine
user interface did not even know whether it was IMAP or POP or NNTP or
local.  In that implementation, IMAP was nothing more than an RPC between
the two instances of the engines.

Everything in Pine used the delete/expunge model with undelete.  I can
also assure you that the save command (which did the "move" operation) was
a copy+delete+expunge, including with Maildir type stores.  I should know.
I wrote that code.

We have heard that you want a MOVE command.  You apparently are not
particularly concerned that it is unimplementable on some servers; nor
that on many others the resulting state of both source and destination
mailbox in the event of a failure is indeterminate.

If you don't have any further technical details (as opposed to simply
being argumentative) to add, then please stop wasting any more time.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.