On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Henry Baragar wrote: >Hello, >What is the purpose of the "bincimap-subscribed" file?
It stores a list of subscribed folders. This file (and its content) is shared among concurrent clients. >Does bincIMAP keep track of the subscribed folders for the IMAP client? If >so, what happens if two different imap clients (or two different instances >of the same client) that subscribe to different mail folders access the >same IMAPdir directory? Are they forced to subscribe to the same folders, >or does file just track the union of all subscribed folders? Subscribed folders are sort of "roaming" in IMAP. So if you subscribe to a set of folders with one client, then all other clients will also have the same list of subscribed folders. If one unsubscribes, then all "unsubscribe". When a client logs on, it is common that it issues the LSUB command (List SUBscribed mailboxes) and updates its local state. If the user chooses to subscribe to a folder, the client issues a SUBSCRIBE command, and Binc IMAP eventually writes the data to "bincimap-subscribed" so that concurrent clients can receive the changes. :-) >When is this file regenerated. What happens when the folders get renamed >by something other than bincIMAP? My experience seems to be, with Opera7 >going against an unpatched bincimap-1.2.0b1, that Opera7 (or maybe >bincIMAP) gets very confused when the folders are manually renamed. Clients are sometimes confused, but they should not be according to the standard. As long as the client always obeys the server's list of subscribed folders, all will be well. Problems occur when clients keep a local state of subscribed folders in order to avoid having to issue LSUB on every login. Offline clients are also a problem. Sometimes the client lets you subscribe to folders even when the client is not logged on (phone hung up, internet connection dead). When the client reconnects, it will have a load of "pending" subscriptions, some of which may fail and so on and so forth. If a mailbox is manually renamed, the client will notice this when it tries to SELECT it. The SELECT will fail, and the user will probably get a popup notice saying "invalid mailbox". It's then up to either the user or the client to unsubscribe to the old mailbox and subscribe to a new one. Hope this helps! Andy :-) -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something | than to do it poorly."
