On Mon, 11 Aug 2003 17:10:13 -0400 Pete Maclean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Fair enough. Of course there's no law that says a client has to know what > it's doing but let us suppose that it does. Then a lot depends on exactly > what one means by "know". I was thinking of the kind of situation where a > client knows implicitly that all messages filtered into a certain mailbox > are created by a certain automaton and always formatted in an identical > way. (And being the kind of client that uses BINARY, the last thing it > wants to do is waste transmission cost by verifying the format by fetching > BODYSTRUCTUREs.) Then one day someone decides to "improve" the automaton > by having it use a different encoding method but neglects to inform the client. Regardless. If a client recieves a series of responses that contain content, it MUST deal with them -- usually by caching the content. If it then receives a NO response for the command, it MUST be able to deal with that. All that is left is for the client to figure out what was returned and what was not. This depends on the contract for the client. If it is a general UA, it would probably display markup for the successfully retrieved content and nothing for the content that was not retrieved. The point is, that the IMAP response syntax specifically allows for response data to be returned but an overall command to fail. Every client MUST deal with this situation. Cheers. --- Steve Hole Chief Technical Officer - Electronic Billing and Payment Systems ACI Worldwide Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 780 424 4922
