At 2002-04-24 15:57, Mark Crispin wrote: >The latter method is the least burdensome for long-term probing of a >thousand messages, since it operates on a principle of server "push" >rather than polling with a client "pull". No properly-designed system >should have a problem with that many sessions.
Of course, if I remember my TCP aright, there's a limit of around 65000 connections from one host to one port of another host... I suppose that _is_ a lot of mailboxes. >However, there is a cost in authentication; and in some servers the cost >of authentication is greater than polling via STATUS. But you only have to authenticate once per mailbox, at least? And then you can leave the connections up as long as the session. >The right solution is not to use IMAP for this at all, but rather a >facility that is specifically designed for "push" announcements of updates >to large numbers of mailboxes. There is currently not a widely-available >facility which meets this criteria, but it's being worked on. Would this be something other than an IMAP extension, then? I always supposed the obvious solution would be an 'IDLE' for groups of mailboxes... -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA
