question about results of FIND MAILBOXES

["Steven D. Majewski" <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 30, 23:43, Mark Crispin wrote:
>  [ ... ]
>      The version you are running, 6.0(30), is very old.  Please get a current
> version of the IMAP toolkit from ftp.cac.washington.edu, file mail/imap.tar.Z
>  [ ... ]
>      The current draft is draft-ietf-imap-imap2bis-02.txt, available from the
> ftp.cac.washington.edu archive or from your favorate Internet drafts server.
> It is going to be updated very soon (a matter of days).
> 

Thanks Mark, 

I've updated my server ( imapd-3.2) and now SELECT and a few other
things seem to work more consistently for me now, including 'FIND
MAILBOXES' - however, now that it works, I see that the output list is
not ONLY mailboxes, but the equivalent of doing a unix 'ls' with the
same pattern. All files and directories are listed, including '.' and
'..' if they match.

Trying to SELECT a directory returns BAD, but selecting a non mailbox
text file DOES return "1 EXISTS" and the text of the file is retrievable
with "FETCH 1 RFC822"

Is this the intentional behaviour ? 
It appears (to me) to be counter to implications in RFC1176.
IMAPbis then says: 
	"The FIND MAILBOXES command as described in RFC-1176 is
	hereby more thoroughly defined. "
but then goes on to say that the meaning of the results are 
implementation dependent.

I would like a little more guidance/discussion of what are reasonable 
expected bounds to this implementation dependent behaviour. 

I'm not necessarily saying that what imapd is doing is unreasonable -
I can come up with arguments either way. I can live with not
distinguishing between mailboxes and ordinary files, although it seems
a bit odd to me that it's is NOT explicitly the server's duty. I would
probably prefer if directories where somehow tagged as directories 
(and since posix-like name conventions are already documented in
Naming.TXT, I would suggest that a trailing '/' be appended to the
names of directories), but again, I could live with the current 
behaviour as long as it is specified somehow that that IS in fact
what a server ought to do.  


[ Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious in IMAP2bis - it
  usually takes me a couple of reads to digest these documents 
  sufficiently. ] 


- Steve Majewski       (804-982-0831)      <[e-mail]>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics