At 4:49 PM -0400 9/26/07, Charles Marcus imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
On 9/26/2007, Fábio M. Catunda (catunda@contactnet.com.br) wrote:
Could it could be written to simply create the folder if the target folder doesn't exist (ie, if the initial save fails due to non-existent folder)? Then there would be no performance hit...
There will be a performance hit couse you have to check if the folder exists or not.
This is not good... but not what I wrote either.
I'm not a programmer, so this may not be possible, but...
What I wrote was, do NOT test BEFORE delivery is attempted - only create the folder IF delivery attempt FAILS *DUE* to non-existent folder.
Ie:
Deliver to user+foo Error: Folder 'foo' doesn't exist for user Ok, Do: Create folder 'foo' for user ReDo: Deliver to user+foo
Maybe this is not reliable - and if not, definitely shouldn't be done. But if there is a way to catch the error 'destination folder doesn't exist', then it would NOT be a performance hit, because no test is performed, only an error handled differently.
I don't think there would be much real benefit on most OS's and filesystems given what is going to actually need to happen underneath the surface logic. It is simpler in English, and maybe in C, but the difference in what actually gets done is trivial, because whether the code says 'check for existence' or 'use this' the OS is still going to have to do roughly the same work.
More significantly, I think such a feature as you describe would have to be used with great caution. I certainly don't want to find that some spammer has created a bazillion new IMAP folders by sending to random tags.
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Bill Cole
bill@scconsult.com