It's pretty common in the voice world to want to announce "You have 4 new messages and 384 saved messages" without ever FETCHing the saved ones. Our mail server has a proprietary extension rather like the status counters for this purpose.
Edward Hibbert Internet Applications Group Data Connection Ltd Tel: +44 131 662 1212 Fax: +44 131 662 1345 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: <http://www.dataconnection.com> -----Original Message----- From: Arnt Gulbrandsen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 24 November 2003 16:06 To: DINH Viet Hoa Cc: IMAP list Subject: Re: expunge and messages count DINH Viet Hoa writes: > 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
