Help test IMAP access to the IETF archives

[Robert Sparks <[e-mail]>]

Folks -

We have been testing IMAP access to the IETF archives for several days 
now, with volunteers from the tools-discuss and ietf chairs lists, and 
it's been going well. Thank you if you've been helping test already (and 
please continue to do so)!

Now we need more testers. We'd like to get a simple measure of load, so 
we'd like to have as many folks as are willing accessing the test 
instance at the same time with various clients during the next week. It 
would be particularly helpful to have several people using the system 
next Thursday.

If you're willing to take the time to do this, please drop me a note 
directly (I've set reply-to on this message) so I have a feel for how 
many people are participating.

Instructions for accessing the test instance are below.

Please report any issues you find directly to me. Do not open tickets 
with the secretariat. Be aware that there are known issues with the data 
on the test instance (some lists have blank or truncated messages) that 
have not yet been addressed - it would be good to report any more you 
find to me, but they won't get fixed immediately.

Please use [e-mail] for general conversation. If you have 
feature requests, that's a good place to send them. One request we've 
had from a few testers so far is to provide an additional shared folder 
with a mailbox for each list that has only the "recent" messages from 
that list - perhaps the last 6 months. It would be good to hear from 
folks, after they've tried what's there now, whether that would be 
useful to spend development time on, or if that time would be better 
spent elsewhere.

The test instance is getting mail with only a slight delay after it 
comes through the lists - you should see current traffic.

Please resist the temptation to download the entire archive of every 
list. I've done it - it's huge (~28G when MailMate does it) and it it's 
a severe torture test for clients. Interrupt your client if it starts 
trying to do that to you. Caching a copy of this test instance will not 
be useful when we deploy the production instance.

Instead, what would help us the most is to configure your client to 
access those lists you normally subscribe to, and to spend some time 
next week browsing and searching those lists and exploring a few lists 
that are new to you.

You can find the details for where the test instance is listening, and 
rudimentary instructions for setting up a few clients, at 
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/tools/trac/wiki/ImapTesting>. Please 
improve that page as you see the opportunity.

Thanks in advance for any time you can give this.

RjS