On Thu, 14 May 2009, Mark Crispin wrote:
The ONLY valid use for subscriptions is if a server exports netnews groups or
similar functionality. This allows the user to keep a list of which
newsgroups he is subscribed to. Now that netnews is effectively dead, the
purpose and use of IMAP subscriptions should die with it.
I had thought subscriptions vaguely useful - if a user has a lot of
archived mail - e.g. 10 folders "1990", "1991" etc. - that they
don't want cluttering up the folder list, they may unsubscribe from them. If they
then login with a different client, the subscribed list will persist.
OK, in a GUI they may achieve almost the same uncluttering effect by
moving them all into a single subfolder e.g. "1990-1999"
Also, it is a mechanism to avoid seeing spamassassin, vacation, procmail
etc. control files.
Any client which do a LIST * and subscribe all the names returned is broken
by design. This means you, Outlook and Thunderbird. That practice
is completely unnecessary, and is based upon false folklore.
I don't see Thunderbird doing that, I see it doing
lsub "" "*"
and when I use the unsubscribe tool,
list "" "%"
list "" "%/%"
showing all folders (and non-mail files) to which I might wish to
subscribe
Alpine on the other hand does 'RLIST "" %' and lists all the .vacation,
.spamassassin etc. so if one doesn't have a mail directory (as per the
Thunderbird default) many confusing files show up in "Folders on
mail.example.com" (OK, there is a disable-dot-files)
Andrew Daviel
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