[Imap-uw] Re: moving mail between folders is intermittently failing

[Brian Hayden]

On May 6 2010, Mark Crispin wrote:


>Reliable does not mean "does not fail".


Coincidentally, nobody said it did. Interesting!

This is another fun historical dissertation, at whose core is: "change the 
RFCs, and until then maintain some righteous anger."


>What you think of as being "failure" are all application layer concept:

>

>[1] The application received a session disconnect (FIN) from TCP.  This is

>completely an application concept; TCP considers this to be a completely

>normal shutdown of the session.

>

>[2] The application received a session reset (RST) from TCP.  This

>indicates that the application attempted to communicate with a TCP peer

>that does not exist.  This is what most people (mistakenly) call a "TCP

>failure".

>

>[3] The application unilaterally decides that a failure has occurred.

>

>Now, [1] and [2] generally indicate the demise of the peer, with [1] being

>the normal and expected result of a mutually-agreed upon demise.  [2] is

>not supposed to happen with debugged implementations, except when a

>link-level disconnect outlasts a FIN-wait.

>

>But neither of these are what the discussion is about.  That is [3]:


That is quite a sleight of hand there. It makes your pats on the heads of 
the "young'ns" look even sillier. You've oversimplified [2[ to the point 
where it edges from "oversimplified" to "misleading."

-Brian