On 08/30/99 Brendan Cully uttered the following other thing:
> Well, I finally did a little investigating into how Mutt handles the
> Cyrus IMAP server and, frankly, it's not too good.
>
> As a side note, the advice to set your $folder to "{server}INBOX." is
> actually fine. Cyrus explicitly names the home namespace "INBOX", where
> it is omitted in UW-IMAP.
Using {server}user.<login>. works better, since then it should have a
parent for browsing.
> Browsing is, um... peculiar. I fixed a simple bug where Mutt was showing
> folders twice regardless of their selectable/inferior flags (Cyrus uses
> the same flag names, but different cases. I switched mutt to use
> caseless comparators). But it's still messy. Switching into folders
> works, but there's no parent for switching back out.
Hmm, when I wrote it, my version of cyrus didn't show those flags at
all.
> Selecting the INBOX is hard work unless done explicitly - I think Mutt's
> namespace code could use some work.
>
> I'm going to try to make some sense out of Mutt's Cyrus interaction.
> People who said it was a mess are absolutely right - I just haven't
> tested against it until now.
One possibility is to go with the way Outlook and Communicator have
gone, which is to have a local cache of the folders, and cache the
entire hierarchy. With cyrus, you can even just fetch everything (ie,
LIST "" user.blong.*) since it is unlikely to be large. UW is the pain,
since its basically an ls -R of the entire directory structure. The way
other clients work is usually to use a combination of
subscribe/unsubscribe, lsub/list and cache the results, with a way to
"update folder list" or what not to refetch the list. They also
generally specify a "root" for the mail directory on the server (for UW,
I imagine) so people can set that to /home/blong/Mail and not do an ls
-R on / or even their home directory.
Ugh, eh? The only things worse than IMAP are the implementations.
Brandon
--
Brandon Long "Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies
Fiction L Networks evaluate it as being at least a misdemeanor."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
http://www.fiction.net/blong/
