Arnt Gulbrandsen writes:

> When OE has edited a message, how can you discover that an edit has taken
place? 

If by "you" you mean "OE user", OE provides a "Modified" field which
although not part of the mail view by default is configurable within the UI,
this displays (and can sort by) the time of most recent message
modification. I see no other way for OE users to discover that an edit has
taken place as the fact that the UID & Message-ID have changed is not
visible.

If by "you" you mean a MUA interoperating with Outlook, this is (I think)
easy if you store the UID (and/or Message-ID) as well as the
timestamp+author "permanent key", so long as you are willing to assume
uniqueness of folder+timestamp+author. If you can't find a message in a
folder of a particular UID/Message-ID, then if you can find a message of the
associated date+author then that latter message is ipso facto (given the
uniqueness assumption) an edited version of the original message. Once again
a hypothesized persistent internal key in OE may obviate the need for OE to
make this (arguably questionable) assumption, and OE's  "Modified" internal
metadata also helps. Of course there may be some way that Exchange exposes
the "Modified" metadata to IMAP clients that I haven't been able to discover
as yet, it only appears that it is not doing so via "plain IMAP".
 
--Bill McCoy

-----Original Message-----
From: Arnt Gulbrandsen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 12:42 PM
To: Bill McCoy
Cc: IMAP Interest List; Mark Crispin
Subject: Re: date & header semantics of bulletin board messages


Bill McCoy writes:
> In any case my observations indicate that Outlook/Exchange 2000 does 
> in fact change the Message-ID whenever a message is edited, both in 
> the case where that message originated via "New Post in This Folder" 
> and was subsequently edited (with the "Revise Contents" command) and 
> also in the case where the message was delivered via SMTP and was 
> later edited (with the "Edit Message" command). And I must 
> interoperate with OE2K. While the Outlook/Exchange Message-IDs are 
> rather lengthy there does not appear to be any information which is 
> common between 2 edited messages, i.e. I can't find an unchanging UID 
> sub-encoded within and it looks like it's just a system or 
> folder-specific GUID value concatenated with an incrementing counter 
> (see examples below).

When OE has edited a message, how can you discover that an edit has 
taken place? As near as I can tell, the effect of OE's "Edit Message" 
command must be identical to that of deleting the old message and 
writing a new one.

--Arnt

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