Re: Communciator 4.02 Imap EXPUNGE problem

[Eric Rizzo <[e-mail]>]

> 
> On Mon, 25 Aug 1997 08:03:08 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time), Barry Leiba,
> Multimedia Messaging wrote:
> > Then, again, there is nothing in the RFC that indicates that one shouldn't
> > do this.  I repeat, yet one more time, that tossing criticism around for
> > someone's "doing such a bizarre thing", and accusing that client of "highly
> > anti-social" behaviour, when the client-writer followed the spec is
> > inappropriate.
> 
<snip>
> 
> > Instead, let's use these experiences to clarify the spec or
> > to add to an "implementer's guide" that warns people against doing things
> > that commonly deployed servers or mail stores or whatever can't handle well.
> 

As a IMAP-concerned "developer," I for one agree with these two
statements.  Those who monitor this list, and especially Mr. Crispin,
might notice that I've been asking a number of questions over the last
few months, and most of them are related to clarifications on issues I
could not 100% resolve by reading the RFC alone.  I think some sort of
"Implementor's Guide" would be an invaluable tool for people/groups
trying to make clients and servers that are as inter-operable as
possible.  Of course, I can imagine how busy the original RFC author(s)
are with projects, but I think someone, or a small group of us (IMAP
developers) should be able to come up with this kind of thing.  

Aside: A client that uses 2 seperate connections (sessions) as described
by Mr. Leiba, makes the server load/work/WhaterverYouCallIt O(2n)
instead of O(n) (n being the number of concurrent users), doesn't it? 
In the CS 3xx course I took, it was taught that O(xn) is really no worse
off than O(n), for reasonble x integer values.

I think we've all got to work together to bring IMAP to the rest of the
world...

-- 
Eric Nicholas Rizzo                            University of Miami
[e-mail]    http://www.ece.miami.edu/~erizzo
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