On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Joel wrote:Thanks Andy. Given the weird mix of works/doesn't work, I wasn't sure if I was seeing a client or server issue. I've been delaying asking this at bincimap (as well as mozilla) because of this, but then I saw this thread so I chimed in. Does it still make sense to you that some subfolders are sometimes displayed evn under the 'doesn't work' scenarios (eg, when creating a new subfolder)? The inconsistency of behavior is another thing I've found confusing with this.
"Doesn't work" means that I can't access some or all subfolders, some or
all of the time. I have tried creating a new subfolder, then all of the
subfolders in that folder suddenly show up. But that's going to get real
tiring after doing it on all my clients on all my machines. Especially
since I can't seem to delete the temporary subfolders... None of these
clients seem to have issues accessing subfolders on a server running
Courier IMAP.
Hi, Joel,
I definitely have ideas as to why this doesn't work with certain clients. Most client sadly don't have a clear picture of what plain old IMAP features and what it doesn't, because they aren't written using the rfc/standard as reference, but implemented step-by-step (often migrating from POP3 code) using "whatever's out there" as reference.
Courier-IMAP, and most other IMAP servers, supports the CHILDREN extension, and Binc does not. This feature specifically describes whether or not a folder has subfolders in the LIST and LSUB responses using flags like \HasChildren and \HasNoChildren. It's only natural for a client author to assume that \HasChildren will mean "has children" while nothing means "has no children". This is, however, not proper IMAP.
Binc has done what it can to adhere 100% to the IMAP spec when it comes to displaying folders without supporting CHILDREN. Recent versions of Mozilla were fixed after being tested with Binc IMAP - if the former bug was located in platform dependent code, it may well be that the same version (1.6a was where it was discovered) of Mozilla works on one platform and not on another.
In version 1.3 of Binc IMAP, we will add support for several IMAP extensions, and I'm quite confident that the "missing subfolder" problems will all go away then. But until then, and until somebody proves me wrong, I'm going to assume that the clients are at fault and not Binc IMAP.
Andy :-)
-- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
I'll try to give Mozilla 1.7b a spin when I get a chance.
Thanks, Joel
