[Dovecot] CATENATE/literal8 issue

[Michael M Slusarz]

Using 2.2.2, I see this:

C: 6 APPEND "INBOX" (\seen) "16-May-2013 22:05:14 -0600" CATENATE (URL  
"/INBOX;UIDVALIDITY=1255685337/;UID=48812/;SECTION=HEADER" TEXT ~{40}
S: 6 NO [UNKNOWN-CTE] Binary input allowed only when the first part is binary.

Why is there this limitation?  It seems to me that CATENATE is  
confusing the content-type encoding of the data/part itself with the  
encoding of the IMAP literal.

A literal 8 is nothing more than a series of OCTET's that *may*  
contain nulls, but not necessarily.  i.e., in the above example the 40  
octets of data are US-ASCII text, which is perfectly acceptable to  
send as a literal8.  (Client rationale: If BINARY exists on the  
server, we don't bother to scan IMAP literal's for null data -- we  
just send them as literal8's.  It's an optimization that I would hate  
to get rid of.)

michael