> This is, in my opinion, a real weakness of UW-IMAP. The "Maildir" folder, as > used by Dovecot for example, avoids that issue altogether.
It has nothing to do with maildir, and everything to do with being able to insist that only certain classes of objects located in certain locations in the filesystem are accessible via IMAP. When UW IMAP was first written, nearly 20 years ago, that was not an acceptable position. People would refuse to use IMAP at all if they had to adjust their way of doing things to comply with "IMAP requirements." Back then, mail was in traditional UNIX (mbox) format and could be anywhere (and I do mean anywhere) in the user's home directory tree, limited only by the user's imagination. To make matters worse, even hiding dot files was unacceptable. How dare I hide something that is on the server; that's up for the IMAP client to decide & etc. The only reason why the hide dot file option exists at all is because I snuck it in because I felt that it was the right thing. So, now we're stuck with not knowing, nor of being able to restrict, where the mail data lives. What about the data type? Plus, UW IMAP supports 8 or so formats of local mailbox. Any one of these may be in use. Some users use more than format. So, for every object encountered in the filesystem, it might be any of these 8 and the only way to determine is to look. Guess how slow it was to look on the filesystems of the early 1990s. Hence the use of the dummy driver, whose main purpose is to consider ALL filesystem objects as being part of the mail store. It was the only way to allow listing mailboxes to complete before the sun novas. Remember as well that UW IMAP can export any arbitrary text file. There was this idea (not mine) of using IMAP as a replacement for FTP to fetch files from a repository. That wasn't actually a bad idea; HTTP is used for that purpose commonly today. But it didn't take off. Dovecot does not labor under the same set of design restrictions. The world is a much easier place when you can decide that all mail must either be maildir -- which is easily identifiable by inspecting a directory without reading file data -- or mbox files in a well known place. If UW IMAP went to that much easier place in the early 1990s, we would not be having this discussion now. UW IMAP would have failed to gain acceptance, the CMU folks wouldn't have joined the IMAP effort, and the IMAP protocol would have languished in obscurity as some crazy idea that Mark Crispin had decades ago that never took off. IMAP would have had good company -- there were lots of really good protocol ideas that ended up in the refuse heap of history for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Moving forward... I have given serious consideration to deleting support for some of the old formats in Panda IMAP, and perhaps even requiring that mix be the one and only format. That would, in effect, make Panda IMAP behave just like Dovecot in that regard. People could always use UW IMAP (at least until it software rots) if they want to use one of the old crufty formats. -- Mark -- _________________________________________________________________ Store, manage and share up to 5GB with Windows Live SkyDrive. http://skydrive.live.com/welcome.aspx?provision=1?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_skydrive_102008_______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list [email protected] http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
