On 25.9.2006, at 16.40, Anand Buddhdev wrote:
The person who designed the IDLE extension was obviously not thinking properly. What's the point in having a multi-folder mail access protocol such as IMAP if the server can't notify the client of changes in the folders? However, the protocol's designer is rather pig-headed, and firmly refuses to entertain the idea of IDLE for multiple folders.
Well, it's really not simple from the protocol point of view and it
wouldn't be simple to implement either. The protocol supports only a
single mailbox to be selected at a time, and changing that would be a
huge change.
However the existing protocol pretty much already makes it possible:
Whenever a mailbox changes, send a STATUS reply to client containing
the changes (messages/unread/etc. counters). This is what the clients
want to know anyway. I don't know if any clients actually support
this, probably not. No servers support this either, although I was
thinking about adding support for it once my mailbox list index is
working.