In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, also sprach Iain
MacDonnell:
>Jerry Peek writes:
>: On 8 September 2000 at 20:05, Iain MacDonnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>: > I'm just saying that an
>: > IMAP imeplementation could ignore sequences except for "unseen".
>:
>: I haven't thought a lot about internals here... but couldn't an IMAP
>: implementation just store its sequences in the context file (by
>: default, ~/Mail/context)? This is what commands like "mark -nopublic"
>: do. All nmh commands can access these sequences.
>
>Does IMAP actually have any concept of sequences, though? I thought that was
>left up to the client... time to get out that RFC :)
IMAP does not directly support sequences, but the IMAP standard does allow
arbitrary tags and practically all IMAP implementations support them. One
could mark a message as being part of a sequence with such a tag. I'm not
sure how well that'd work, but it's one way. It's certainly how any
implementation of the unseen sequence would have to work.
Storing IMAP sequences in one's local filesystem, as Jerry Peek appears to
be suggesting, is another approach, but it has problems. There are some
trivial annoyances -- IMAP folders can't have the same name as local
folders, for example. However, there's a more fundamental bug: The entire
advantage of IMAP lies in storing parts of one's email environment -- unseen
messages, etc. -- on a central server that one can access from anywhere.
Storing sequences on local filesystems violates that idea to the extent that
people consider sequences to be a part of their email environment. I submit
that people would so consider.
JCR
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