Hi, I'm working on an IMAP client and had a question about the order in which commands are responded to in Dovecot.

In other IMAP servers I've looked at, when you issue two commands simultaneously (i.e. pipelining) it looks something like this:

a fetch something b fetch something else

• 1 FETCH (result) a OK FETCH completed
• 1 FETCH (result) b OK FETCH completed

This works well because it's clear which results are associated with which tag; the 'a' fetch results immediately precede the a's OK response, and likewise the 'b' fetch results immediately precede the b's OK response.

But in Dovecot (version 2.0.13) the results of the two simultaneous commands are ordered like this:

a fetch something b fetch something else

• 1 FETCH (result)
• 1 FETCH (result) a OK FETCH completed b OK FETCH completed

This makes associating the results of the fetch commands quite a bit more difficult, since it's not entirely clear which results are paired with which tag.

My question is this: is this Dovecot's intended behavior, or did I find a bug? I realize the IMAP spec is really vague about this. If this is the intended behavior, is there any advice for clients on how to determine which results are associated with which command?

Thanks!

• Eric