[Dovecot] Question about IMAP

[Charles Marcus]

Hi Timo,

I have a question that you can maybe answer off the top of your head,
considering your vast knowledge of the IMAP protocol...

There is a Thunderbird bug that is near and dear to my heart, that is
trying to address how Thunderbird deals with large messages (ie,
messages with large attachments).

Current behavior sucks... it downloads the entire message every time the
message is clicked on.

My question is:

Using the IMAP protocol, is there a way, *without* downloading the
entire message (specifically, binary attachments), that an IMAP client
can do the following:

1. Download *only* the message headers and the text/html/body contents
of the body of the message but *not* any binary attachments,

2. Detect that a message *has* one or more binary attachments, *without*
downloading them,

3. Grab the names of all of the attachments,

4. Display for the user the email/email headers and text/html body parts,

5. Display the existence of the attachments in whatever manner the
client normally shows them (in TBird, they show at the bottom of the
message just above the status bar),

6. Download the actual attachment on demand - ie, if/when it is
dbl-click > opened, right-click > saved, or the message is forwarded?

Pointers to appropriate IMAP protocol docs would be happily passed on to
them the Mozilla dev guys.

Thanks!

-- 

Best regards,

Charles