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On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 04:04:39AM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
tomas@tuxteam.de put forth on 6/26/2010 11:52 PM:
The references are spot-on. The IDLE command is just designed to notify changes to the *selected* mailbox [...]
None of this is laid out in RFC2177.
Maybe not explicitly. But have you looked at 2177? The way it works is thus:
(1) client says SELECT <mailbox> (2) server says OK (among other things) (3) client says IDLE (4) server says + (meaning: I'm waiting for more)
(5) now connection is quiescent until:
(6) either server says EXISTS (or EXPUNGE)
(7) client ends IDLE with DONE
Note that at step 7 in this example scenario, server has *no way to say to which mailbox this EXISTS refers to*. It mus refer to the selected mailbox and just to that.
That means that the way IDLE is specified, only notofications referring to one mailbox can be received.
None of the relevant things we're discussing are in RFC2177 anyway.
See above: RFC2177 tells us: "one connection per mailbox", and...
They'rein RFC3501, which is rather lengthy.
...RFC3501 tries to fix exactly that.
Regardless, my point is valid and stands: there is no (good) reason for the protocol to require multiple socket connections when everything can be accomplished more efficiently (in terms of resources consumed) over a single socket.
Well, that's the point of IMAP NOTIFY in RC3501. If this extension is implemented, one socket will suffice to receive notifications concerning several mailboxes. As long as we don't have that, clients will work around the limitations of NOTIFY by opening several connections. That's what Patrick was saying upthread:
"Or even better: IMAP NOTIFY [2] gets implemented in dovecot and in Thunderbird, and one TCP connection suffices for an arbitrary amount of "push" folders :)"
I'm sure many people more qualified than me have pointed this out WRTthe IMAP protocol over the years.
I don't exactly know what you mean by "this". Before the IDLE extension, there was no (portable) way to get notifications via IMAP at all: clients had to poll. After the IDLE extension, there's just one mailbox per connection (no way to argue around that: the protocol is just designed this way) the client gets nudged. As this was seen as a limitation, now there's IMAP NOTIFY, which just does what you ordered. Now to convince client and server implementors to use it :-)
Regards
- -- tomás -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
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