[Old thread.  I'm writing a read-only, anonymous-only server for
publishing list archives, etc.]

For the SELECT command, what should a server do for OK [UNSEEN n] when
there are no unseen messages?  Omit that part of the response?

Right now, my greeting looks like "* OK [READ-ONLY] ...".  How should
it look exactly, if I wanted to include CAPABILITY information at that
point?  Would that require omitting [READ-ONLY]?  In that case, would
it be better to keep [READ-ONLY] instead, since CAPABILITY informatino
is still available through that command?

ATM, my CAPABILITY string says "IMAP4rev1 AUTH=ANONYMOUS AUTH=PLAIN".
(For AUTHENTICATE PLAIN and LOGIN, any username and password are
accepted.)  I do not support STARTTLS right now.  I know this violates
a MUST, but password privacy is not much of an issue for an
anonymous-only server.  In practice, will it cause interoperability
problems to reject STARTTLS?

I wrote:
> What about \Recent and \Seen - how should they be set initially, and
> should they be automatically updated during the session?

Still curious about this.  My server will store no permanent
per-client data, so PERMANENTFLAGS will be empty.  This will let
clients know that they should, if they can, store flags locally; they
can, if they care, use STORE at the beginning of every session and
FETCH (FLAGS) at the end to synchronize the flags.  If a client does
that, then it won't matter how I set \Seen and \Recent initially.  But
for other clients, what would be most useful?  ATM, I'm thinking I
would initially set \Seen and not \Recent for every message when
SELECTing a mailbox, and then for any new messages that appear during
the session, initially set \Recent and not \Seen.  Does that sound ok?


paul

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