When you say 'the existing protocol', do you mean the IDLE/ENHANCED_IDLE' protocol?
I've no idea what ENHANCED_IDLE is. Some Thunderbird-specific name for something? In any case there's no such protocol.
Hmmm... googling, I see lots of references - but nothing concrete. Seems it may be some kind of extension to the IDLE protocol... Courier supports it - and in fact, almost every google hit is courier related.
And yea, I mean the existing IMAP RFC which already sends STATUS replies when asked with STATUS command. They could be sent to client when it's IDLEing (and could be sent even when it's not).
I think it would be great for Dovecot to support this - then it would simply (sic) be a matter of getting the mail clients (Thunderbird, etc) to support it...
Any idea how much work *that* might be? Obviously, the simpler, the more chance of getting the devs to implement it.
The good thing with the STATUS-reply way is that the clients already are parsing them. Most clients however seem to ignore all the untagged events that they didn't themself request from the server.
Cool - means it may be trivial to get the Client to just not ignore them...
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Best regards,
Charles