>Folks, creeping featurism is not a good thing. It is especially not a good >thing when the end user function is already possible with the existing >functionality set, and the proposed new feature is a minor tweak that may be >more efficient on some servers.
I totally, earnestly agree about creeping featurism. However I still yearn for a clean way for IMAP to implement a move operation. (I mean "move" now from the point of view of the user, not implying anything about a MOVE per se in IMAP.) And by "clean", I mean a move that does not leave flagged-deleted messages behind. This seems so basic to me that I think it undeserving to brand it a symptom of creeping featurism. Email clients lead users to expect to be able to move messages around, and there's no turning back on that. At this point, maybe a MOVE in IMAP is a bad idea, but there should be other ways to do it, an atomic EXPUNGE as Mark mentioned for example. Is that a really bad idea? Can anyone see another way? Now I am going to stick my neck out, risk the wrath of the keepers of IMAP, and suggest one other thing I want. This, I admit, smells a little more of feature creep but it would make life very much more comfortable for many users. I would like a feedback mechanism for the COPY command, so the server sends an untagged response as each message in a set is copied. And let me hasten to add that this is not with any intention of making COPY other than an all-or-nothing affair, absolutely not. It is for two reasons. The first is so that the email client can display a progress indicator to the user. (Outlook Express displays a progress bar anyway even though no actual progress is ever shown!) The second is to prevent a client from timing out when a COPY takes a long time. Pete
