On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Henry Baragar wrote:I would like to take back my "OK" and "That makes sense", since I am
longer sure that it makes sense. Why is it legitimate for bincIMAP to
strip leading and trailing delimiters, but not an IMAP client? Should not
I do not follow you here - Binc treats /folder, folder and folder/ the
same. Binc does not really care what people subscribe to today. It's all
okay. You can subscribe to "/folder" if you like, but if you then disallow
people to subscribe to folders with a "/" in them, then that's a bug in
your client.
Why does Binc map all /folder, folder, folder/ to folder? Why not map /folder to .folder and folder/ to folder.?
Some interesting tidbits:
1. Creating "/" in Opera connected to an IMAPdir depot resulted in the following error message: 'NO CREATE failed: No such mailbox ".bincimap-subscribed"'
2. Creating "/" in Opera connected to a Maildir++ depot resulted in the following error message: 'NO CREATE failed: unable to create ./cur: File exists' (in response to a 'CREATE INBOX//'
3. Opera seems to ignore the create errors (on "/") and does a subscribe anyway, which results in "/" being an alias for "INBOX". Then, moving a message from "INBOX" to "/", causes the message count in "/" to always increment by 1, but only occasionally increment by 1 in "INBOX"!-)
4. I can create "..." and "...." maildir's on Unix and be subscribed to them in opera (and in .bincimap-subscribed), but get the following error message 'NO STATUS failed: Unrecognized mailbox: "//"' in response to a 'STATUS // (MESSAGES UIDNEXT RECENT)'
5. I can create "..." and "...." maildir's on Unix and add them to .bincimap-subscribed; they show up as blanks in Squirrelmail. When I try to rename "///", I get the following error message 'ERROR : Could not complete request. Query: UNSUBSCRIBE "//" Reason Given: UNSUBSCRIBE failed: Not subscribed to "//"', but I can create a subfolder.
I think that we would all like to see subscribed mailboxes in .bincimapsubscribed match as closely as possible to a directory in IMAPdir: this minimizes entropy. I still think that there are improvements that could be made. I have a couple of (minor) ideas, but would like the weekend to review the IMAP documentation and to ponder them more (to ensure that they really are improvements).
But they are not unrelated. If I subscribe to "folder" after having already subscribed to "/folder" I expect them to be different. Quirkiness results when moving mail from "folder" to "/folder" in Opera (as mentioned above).
If Outlook subscribed to "/folder" when the path was reported by Binc to be "folder", then that's a buglet in Outlook. But if Binc actually reported a mailbox called "/folder", then that's a buglet in Binc. Binc should report the folders with relative paths.
For Outlook to select /INBOX, /Inbox or /folder is perfectly allowed.
So an attempt to answer your question - Binc does not strip any leading nor trailing delimiters for SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE. It does not for LSUB, and it doesn't for LIST. Internally, Binc may have to strip the delimiters to map the input name to a file name, but that's nothing the client ever sees.
a "LIST" command include a "/folder" (not "folder" as is the case now in
bincIMAP) if "/folder" is recorded in the subscribed file? The Unix folks
No, LIST output and the contents of the subscribed file are not related in
this sense. If I subscribe to "thisfolderdoesnotexist" when it doesn't
exist, then it doesn't make sense for Binc to display it in LIST, which
lists the depository's actual contents.
I was refering to the folder path the client sees: Binc does allow ".." in the directory names (e.g. 'folder..subfolder').
learned long ago that allowing a filename to include a directory delimiter
could lead to some bad situations.
Mind you, I don't know how you reconcile this with allowing "//" in the
middle of a folder path. Once again, some clients don't allow you to
The slash character is neither allowed in IMAPdir or Maildir++. If Binc allows "//" in the folder path then this is a bug in Binc.
Opera will create and subscribe to '/folder' when asked to do so.
create such a folder path, while allowing you to subscribe. Outlook
crashes again in this situation.
All of this is a manifestation of an incomplete IMAP specification, isn't
it?
The IMAP specification was written to accompany so many different types of
backends that the end result is very vague. There are in my opinion too
many SHOULD and too few MUST, but I still understand the historical reason
for these boundary cases.
No client should ever crash no matter what the server says.
Andy - curious to what caused the "/folder" item to appear in the subscribed file. :-)
-- Henry Baragar Principal, Technical Architecture 416-453-5626 Instantiated Software Inc. http://www.instantiated.ca
