Re: [Extra] draft-ietf-extra-imap4rev2-04 review

[Ned Freed <[e-mail]>]

> On 25 Mar 2019, at 13:04, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> >> 3.4.  Logout State
> >>
> >
> >>    A server MUST NOT unilaterally close the connection without
> >> sending
> >>    an untagged BYE response that contains the reason for having done
> >> so.
> >
> > Also already in RFC 3501, but this MUST NOT has to be violated
> > sometimes. For example otherwise it would allow client to FETCH a
> > large message and keep reading it very very slowly over days, and
> > server wouldn't be allowed to disconnect it, because it can't send BYE
> > in the middle of the large mail literal.

> Another example is if a client gets hung up (or goes silently offline)
> during a TLS negotiation. The server has to eventually timeout the
> connection but it would be semantically wrong to send a "* BYE" since
> there's no data channel. One case where this happened was when our SSL
> stack dropped support for an SSLv2-compatible hello (allowed by RFC
> 6176), but some very old client kept sending such a hello (prohibited by
> RFC 6176). Incidentally, SSLv2 is completely incompatible with SSLv3 so
> the client sends something that's not sufficient to complete an SSLv3
> packet so both ends get stuck waiting until one side hangs up.

There was a suggestion (I think) during the meeting that this should be handled
by sending the TLS equivalent of "* BYE". Which sounds fine in theory, but as
said at the time, I'm skeptical that many/most TLS implementations provide
implementors with the means to conveniently do that.

				Ned