As I could understand, in IMAP, we can keep a track of number of messages. But what about recent or unseen messages ? should we always use SEARCH to get the exact count?
Yes.
IIRC, the STATUS-COUNTERS extension could have helped you do this. It's one of the things from the VPIM people. I don't know what its status is - the draft is expired. Its name used to be draft-neystadt-imap-status-counters.
to get information on a folder, should we always use SEARCH ? If there are a lot of messages, it could be wasteful for network traffic, just to count the messages.
How often do you want to JUST count the messages? I suspect that mostly, the client will want to do more, so this waste ought to be very unusual. There's other waste that occurs much more commonly ;)
--Arnt
