Timo,

On 4 Mar 2003, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 20:04, Lawrence Greenfield wrote:
>> This would be stupid for any client to do.
>> 1 FETCH 1:30 (ENVELOPE BODYSTRUCTURE)
>> 2 FETCH 20 BODY[1]
>> is considerably more efficient. Either the user asks for other
>> messages or they don't; you're no worse off since the extra data
>> you're transferring is drowned in the RTT.
>BODYSTRUCTURE isn't immediately needed while showing the message list.
>But sure, if user immediately opens one message it could have helped a
>bit if BODYSTRUCTURE was already known.

Again I have to ask for the motivations for this thread. I have a hunch, 
and correct me if I'm wrong:

Dovecot IMAP has a neat index system that makes the ENVELOPE fetch reach
rocket-speed. The problem is that most clients also fetch BODYSTRUCTURE, 
and so the end user, in practise, notices very little performance change 
compared to other IMAP servers.

You assume the IMAP clients fetch BODYSTRUCTURE _only_ to give a little
paper clip icon in their GUI. Since the full BODYSTRUCTURE content is
heavy to cache/index, you'd like a little flag or something that is easy
to index/cache, with a neat little command / fetch attribute or something
that comes with it.

Then you want to teach all IMAP clients to use this new small extension to 
fetch the paperclip flag, instead of using BODYSTRUCTURE.

It's a neat idea, but I think the benefits you gain in Dovecot from having 
the paperclip extension added to the IMAP protocol, are incredibly minor 
compared to what it does for the rest of the community, which in pracise 
is very little.

Andy :-)

-- 
Andreas Aardal Hanssen - Binc IMAP
http://www.bincimap.andreas.hanssen.name/

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