Hi Eric,
At 05:13 28-03-2013, Burger Eric wrote:
Rather than guessing all of the bad things that could happen, I
would offer it would be better to say what we mean, like:
The IMAP interface MUST NOT provide any IMAP facilities
that modify the underlying message and message metadata, such as
mailbox, flags, marking for deletion, etc. If the client is
authenticated and authorized, the IMAP interface MUST provide
per-user marking of the underlying message as read or flagged.
The IMAP interface is a front-end to the read-only mailboxes
(archive). It's easier to do what is mentioned above.
Something to ponder:
I use the IMAP interface once, mark a bunch of things as read, and
then decide never to use the IMAP interface ever again. How long
does the server need to keep my (per-user) marking metadata? E.g.,
besides CPU and I/O issues, there is a potentially unbounded storage
problem as well. It is unbounded because in IMAP I can assign any
kind of label (marking) to a message, even ones I make up.
One thought for an approach to a solution:
1. per-user markings expire after X time units (six months?)
2. per-user markings may take up at most X storage units (512KB?)
I would go for both.
Per-user metadata can be incredibly useful - I might label things by
project, work group, draft, mumble, or foo. I would not want to
limit the labels to red or green. However, we need some predictable
limit as well.
Yes.
Regards,
-sm