On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, David Woodhouse wrote: > I'm trying to take the view "IMAP is too limiting; how can > we fix it".
That's not the right view. You should instead have "how can I build a good client within the context of IMAP, without expecting the existing IMAP world to add facilities to enable me." > Not entirely. I don't necessarily want a _complete_ synchronised state > -- but neither do I want to have to discard the state I _do_ need, and > download it again shortly thereafter, just because the server gives me > no way to be sure that nothing's changed in the meantime. I keep my IMAP clients (at least, one at home and one in the office) running for days at a time. I have two incoming mailboxes and some newsgroups. All other mailboxes are ones that get updated by my action. > Well, maybe. More fundamentally though, I'd say that this is a > consequence of living on the wrong end of a 64K ISDN link and hoping > that somewhere, somewhen, I can eliminate _any_ redundant traffic to the > IMAP server. I once regularly used IMAP over a 2400 bps line, and to this day I still use IMAP over a CDPD device. Please do not treat me as someone who doesn't understand the issue of slow lines. My claim is not that you should re-download data that you already had. Rather, you should not re-download anything unless you need it; and by following a strict "don't need it, don't download it" will buy you more than efforts to keep the caches of a dozen clients in synchronization with each other. > And redownloading message flags which I already had and which haven't > changed is definitely redundant -- especially if it's doing so just > because I temporarily selected my inbox to read a new mail therein, > before returning to the mailing list I was reading a moment ago. So why didn't you spawn a separate session for the other mailbox? TCP sessions are cheap. > I tend to keep coming back to Pine too, and have tended to use it as an > example of 'ideal' IMAP behaviour. But it's not quite perfect either -- > it _could_ cache headers locally but doesn't, and this means that > sometimes it takes _seconds_ just to draw the screen after I hit PgUp in > a message index, saturating my link while it's at it. I have never had it take more than a second or two, even with CDPD. It all depends upon the size of the envelopes. Have you noticed that Pine *does* completely cache within a session? As long as you don't give up the session, Pine will never re-fetch the same data. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
