Guys, :-) On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Cory Wright wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 09:08:28PM -0800, Caskey Dickson wrote: >> Absolutely, and if we want to convert Courier users to Binc we can't >> require that every existing mailbox be converted as well. >I doubt that I speak for the majority here, but I don't think converting >users should be a priority. Make a better product (as Andy is trying to >do) and the (smart) users will convert on their own, regardless of how >different it is. qmail is an example of this. I do agree, but converting users should be as painless as possible for the _users_. I'm quite sure the administrator doesn't care, but when 100 people call him and go "Hey, Outlook just broke", he or she'll have a hard time convincing everyone that last night's upgrade was for the better. I'm sure we can find a transition that works painlessly. >I also do not think compatibility with Courier-IMAP should play a role in >design decisions. Forget about Courier-IMAP, learn from what was wrong, >and work on making a better IMAP server. >For what it's worth, I am in favor of ~/Maildir/Folder/Subfolder/ style >mailboxes. The problem with not prepending each folder with a dot '.', is that it breaks Maildir++. http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/README.maildirquota.html Although I'm no fan of Courier-IMAP, this is the closest thing we have to a Maildir subfolder standard, and we have to conform to it to work well together with other Maildir++ applications. So our discussion sums up to these points: 1) Binc should allow root level folders, next to INBOX We have two solutions here. One is the NAMESPACE extension, which some clients implement. I like the idea of the NAMESPACE extension, although I think it's a workaround for an implementation problem in a server, and it expects something from the client to "clean it up". NAMESPACE is in many clients a configurable setting that does not require a server extension. In Outlook you can set "INBOX." as the path to the root folder, and Outlook will do some magic to flatten the folder tree. This will not allow subfolders of INBOX next to root folders, though. The other alternative is to implement this in the server. This might mean that users would not be allowed to create folders under INBOX, but we could do something smart here, like creating a special folder under Maildir/ that conforms to Maildir++ and is interpreted as the root folder in Binc IMAP, but as a subfolder of "folders" in other clients. 2) Binc should allow any hierarchy seperator, and should store folders different from what it does today. Binc will allow any hierarchy seperator, but the same seperator will be used inside the Maildir. The first character must FWICS be a '.' for Maildir++ to accept it as a subfolder, and all folders must be called Maildir/.a/ and Maildir/.a.b/, not Maildir/.a/.b/. This breaks the UNIX standard that dotted files are hidden, and as much as I hate it, I would rather create a completely new format than break the existing *ehem* "standard". We could design a Maildir^=2 or something. ;) Andy -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | Nil desperandum
