On Thu, 21 Feb 2003, Timo Sirainen wrote: > I can think of only two reasons why clients still need to bother > rememebering sequence numbers instead of using only UIDs: untagged FETCH > replies updating flags and EXPUNGE replies.
There are many things that you can do with sequence numbers that you can not do with UIDs unless you have the entire UID map downloaded. Invariably, I have found that clients which use UIDs exclusively are incredibly poorly-written and poorly-designed. They issue unnecessary IMAP protocol transactions and do many other silly behaviors which wouldn't happen if they used sequence numbers. > So, how about defining a new extension to give client also the UID in > both of them? FETCH would be easy to just make always return the UID, > but what about EXPUNGE? Would it be bad idea to add the UID after > EXPUNGE reply without client explicitly requesting it? > Or maybe a new UIDEXPUNGE reply that would give a range of deleted UIDs? I don't see how adding a bunch of extensions to EXPUNGE (which would have to be negotiated, not to mention considering compatibility with servers that don't have the extensions) will help poorly-written UID-only clients work any better. Most of these clients already have downloaded the entire UID map, so it isn't as if they can't figure it out for themselves. I oppose the idea of making an already excessively-complex protocol more complicated to further enable poorly-designed clients. In fact, I have come to think that the IMAP implementation of UIDs was a mistake, and that we should have just done what POP3 does for UIDs. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
