[Dovecot] Pre-rev1 compatibility
What about adding some compatibility for pre-rev1 IMAP4 clients which are still around (e.g., CDE dtmail, even in Solaris 10)? Especially, the understanding of command FETCH message (... RFC822.HEADER.LINES (parameters)) instead of FETCH message (... BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (parameters)]) (with correspondingly changed replies) would be desirable and shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
Hans Werner Strube wrote:
What about adding some compatibility for pre-rev1 IMAP4 clients which are still around (e.g., CDE dtmail, even in Solaris 10)? Especially, the understanding of command FETCH message (... RFC822.HEADER.LINES (parameters)) instead of FETCH message (... BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (parameters)]) (with correspondingly changed replies) would be desirable and shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
Yes, I would appreciate that, I still have some users running dtmail and other 'old' mail clients, therefore I cannot migrate these users to the new system, and they don't want to use any other client...
regards dirk
Hans Werner Strube wrote:
What about adding some compatibility for pre-rev1 IMAP4 clients which are still around (e.g., CDE dtmail, even in Solaris 10)? Especially, the understanding of command FETCH message (... RFC822.HEADER.LINES (parameters))
On Wednesday 06 December 2006 06:05, Dirk Essl wrote:
Yes, I would appreciate that, I still have some users running dtmail and other 'old' mail clients, therefore I cannot migrate these users to the new system, and they don't want to use any other client...
My general policy is that in some cases, the user is *not* right. An IT department cannot rationally be required to continue to support obsolete applications when there are supported and modern alternatives. Face it, choice of email client for a small subset of your users is not a business critical application that needs to be supported forever like it was some absolutely essential piece of 1960's era COBOL code.
Perhaps it is time to either fix these obsolete mail clients yourself to be compatible with current protocols, or stop supporting them, as their development teams abandoned them long ago. I don't believe obsolete functionality (pre RFC or deprecated IMAP RFC's) belongs in dovecot imap.
Regards,
- Brian
Brian G. Peterson wrote:
Hans Werner Strube wrote:
What about adding some compatibility for pre-rev1 IMAP4 clients which are still around (e.g., CDE dtmail, even in Solaris 10)? Especially, the understanding of command FETCH message (... RFC822.HEADER.LINES (parameters))
On Wednesday 06 December 2006 06:05, Dirk Essl wrote:
Yes, I would appreciate that, I still have some users running dtmail and other 'old' mail clients, therefore I cannot migrate these users to the new system, and they don't want to use any other client...
My general policy is that in some cases, the user is *not* right. An IT department cannot rationally be required to continue to support obsolete applications when there are supported and modern alternatives. Face it, choice of email client for a small subset of your users is not a business critical application that needs to be supported forever like it was some absolutely essential piece of 1960's era COBOL code.
Perhaps it is time to either fix these obsolete mail clients yourself to be compatible with current protocols, or stop supporting them, as their development teams abandoned them long ago. I don't believe obsolete functionality (pre RFC or deprecated IMAP RFC's) belongs in dovecot imap.
Yes, I totally agree with you, but my company does the whole IT support for a quite big non-profit organization, so things are a little bit different here. Officially we don't support those clients but we are advised to give best effort support to unsupported clients (How stupid does this sound? ;-))
And I can really not understand how someone can use dtmail or exmh (Oh, I don't want to flame here) if we have nice applications like Thunderbird or Apple mail...
Regards,
- Brian
kind regards dirk
On Dec 6, 2006, at 6:29 PM, Dirk Essl wrote:
And I can really not understand how someone can use dtmail or exmh
(Oh, I don't want to flame here) if we have nice applications like
Thunderbird or Apple mail...
OK, I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but whilst I'm
attending LISA in Washington DC right now, this sort of came up with
some people I was talking to a few hours ago. One guy uses pine, one
elm, one mail (yes, /bin/mail), and I use exmh (well, until recently,
and I can't WAIT to get back to it from Apple Mail (yes, Apple Mail
is *nice*, but a) it's kinda b0rken, and b) it's kinda slow). Many
(Most? Certainly old-schoold) SysAdmin's don't use these
"newfangled" mail readers because it blows to grep mail out of .mbx
or whatever format thunderbird uses -- and you may be on a dumb
terminal trying to find that piece of mail with the critical
information.
So, there really are reasons people stick with older mail clients.
Is all the user's cached dtmail (by "cache" I mean "local mail
folders") importable into Thunderbird? What if you live under a
quota? You can't keep it all on the IMAP server.
Now, I'm fine with saying the older mail clients should be updated.
But sometimes it's just not possible. Then again, maybe the dtmail
client software is part of OpenSolaris of the Solaris 8 Community
Source. Frankly, I don't know or care. So tell us that our mail
clients need to meet the current standards. But don't tell us what
to use.
Thank you.
Good night.
Sean
PS And "Be generous in what you accept, strict in what you send" is a
VERY good motto.
participants (4)
-
Brian G. Peterson
-
Dirk Essl
-
Hans Werner Strube
-
Sean Kamath