On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 06:58, Eric A. Hall wrote: > I'm not trying to start a religious war here, but how much work would it > really be to have a protocol extension which allowed the client to request > flags which have changed since <time>. It seems that all of the difficulty > would be in the implementation (the server data-store), not in the > protocol, and there would be significant benefits to having this option > available in the protocol. Faster resynchronization between sessions would > be very good for all clients, online and offline alike.
I'm going to assume you meant something sane when you said <time>, of course :) The protocol side could be fairly simple -- the idea that Timo Sirainen offered in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> seems fairly close to what we'd want. You'd declare that a server supporting FLAGS-VALIDITY _MUST_ include any messages with changed flags in its response, and SHOULD make an effort not to include messages _without_ changed flags. The _implementation_ doesn't have to be that difficult either -- the common case where no other client has changed flags since the last visit can happily be dealt with by a trivial change-counter where we tell a client to redownload _all_ flags if _any_ change has been made. Of course the protocol should allow allow more complex setups where we guarantee to give a list with _no_ false positives. Some more thought about possible such implementations was given in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 17:30, Timo Sirainen wrote: > - Keep flags-validity value of last flag change for each message. Takes > pretty much disk space and may be slow. > - Keep only the last flags-validity value. That helps only when there hasn't > been any flag changes since client last accessed the mailbox > - Keep low-validity and low-uid. if client request any flags-validity >= > low-validity, only return low-uid:* instead of 1:* > - Keep a log of the last few flags-validities and what messages they changed Basically, it all looks technically feasible. It's just a case of whether people will actually want it and start to make use of it. -- dwmw2
