>I don't know IMAP, but is there an IMAP server out there that will be >happy when I overwrite a hunk of ~/mail/inbox/42 in place? IMAP's a >textual protocol so we'd be switching one lot of text parsing in scan >for another. Would pick(1), when talking to `our' IMAP implementation, >make use of extensions to the protocol to save it effort, and fallback >if it's vanilla IMAP?
Good question! In short: - Messages in IMAP are immutable, so if you overwrite ~/mail/inbox/42, in theory you should get a new UID for that message. But maybe our "internal" IMAP implementation wouldn't care. I do wonder how UW-IMAP deals with that, since it claims to be able to serve up MH folders via IMAP - The grammar for IMAP is well-defined and pretty compact; I believe you'd be able to minimize the client/server I/O. I don't think a parser would be terrible for it. - AFAICT, pick(1) is implementable completely via the "vanilla" IMAP protocol, but if I'm wrong I'd be interested in knowing about it. --Ken -- Nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
