Mike Abbott wrote:
So it appears that both the client and Dovecot may be in violation, depending on how you define "ambiguity." The RFC does not explicitly define whether login causes an ambiguity, but I personally believe that login does "affect the results of other commands" (the login may fail, for instance). So the client should not issue commands before receiving the login reply, and Dovecot should not drop commands during login. I have reported the client issue to the developers of the IMAP client, as I am reporting the server issue to you. Fortunately for me, only one or the other needs to change to erase the symptom (hung clients), but fixing both would be best.
See, I can't see how user authentication can NOT effect the results of other commands - if you fail to authenticate, almost EVERY subsequent command result would change.
Whilst I agree it would be nice for dovecot's auth task to pass on the extra comms buffers, it sounds VERY broken to me for the client to be issuing commands blindly without waiting to ensure login worked.
Can I ask which IMAP client has this 'quirky' behavior, that I may avoid it in future?
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net