Announcement: I-D ACTION:draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt

[Mark Crispin <[e-mail]>]

This is a draft which makes several proposed changes to RFC-1730, which
have been discussed both on the mailing list and at January's IMAP
Consortium meeting.  Please review this draft carefully.  If this draft
(or a successor) is accepted, it will replace RFC-1730 as the IMAP4
Proposed Standard.

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.  We have less than two weeks to get this out as a
new RFC.

Changes from RFC-1730:

   1) The STATUS command has been added.
Justification: useful enough to make mandatory

   2) Clarify in the formal syntax that the "#" construct can never
   refer to multiple spaces.
Justification: clarification

   3) Obsolete syntax has been moved to a new Appendix C, and all
   documentation about obsolete commands has been removed from the main
   document.
Justification: editorial

   4) The PARTIAL command has been obsoleted.
Justification: PARTIAL has response ambiguity problems which preclude
client caching.

   5) The RFC822.HEADER.LINES and RFC822.HEADER.LINES.NOT fetch
   attributes have been obsoleted.
Justification: RFC822.HEADER.LINES [.NOT] have response ambiguity problems
which preclude client caching.

   6) The .PARTIAL suffix for text attributes has been added.
Justification: non-ambiguous replacement for PARTIAL command.

   7) The HEADER.LINES and HEADER.LINES.NOT fetch attributes have been
   added.
Justification: non-ambiguous replacement for RFC822.HEADER.LINES [.NOT]

   8) Support for Content-Disposition has been added.
Justification: believed to be useful.

   9) Nested part "number" H has been added for fetching the MIME header
   of a body part.
Justification: support for signature/key validation

   10) The restriction on fetching nested MULTIPART parts has been
   removed.
Justification: support for signature/key validation

   11) Nested part "number" T has been added for fetching the text body
   of a message.
Justification: support signature/key validation

I would also like to have discussion on whether or not John Myers'
suggestion for a UID EXPUNGE command should be in this document or not.  I
am inclined to reject it in the base draft on creeping featurism grounds
(plus it may be hard to implement), and say that it belongs in an
extension instead of in the base protocol.  But I'll let John justify it.

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: [phone]  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 96 09:25:59 -0500
From: [e-mail]
To: IETF-Announce:  ;
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.

       Title     : INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION 4
       Author(s) : M. Crispin
       Filename  : draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt
       Pages     : 75
       Date      : 02/07/1996

The Internet Message Access Protocol, Version 4 (IMAP4) allows a client to
access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server.  IMAP4 permits
manipulation of remote message folders, called "mailboxes", in a way that
is functionally equivalent to local mailboxes.  IMAP4 also provides the
capability for an offline client to resynchronize with the server (see also
[IMAP-DISC]).

IMAP4 includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes;
checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; setting
and clearing flags; RFC 822 and MIME parsing; searching; and
selective fetching of message attributes, texts, and portions thereof.
Messages in IMAP4 are accessed by the use of numbers.  These numbers are
either message sequence numbers (relative position from 1 to the number of
messages in the mailbox) or unique identifiers (immutable, strictly
ascending values assigned to each message, but which are not necessarily
contiguous).

IMAP4 supports a single server.  A mechanism for supporting multiple IMAP4
servers is discussed in [IMSP].

IMAP4 does not specify a means of posting mail; this function is handled by
a mail transfer protocol such as [SMTP].

IMAP4 is designed to be upwards compatible from the [IMAP2] protocol.
Compatibility issues are discussed in [IMAP-COMPAT].

Internet-Drafts are available by anonymous FTP.  Login with the username
"anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address.  After logging in,
type "cd internet-drafts" and then
     "get draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt".
A URL for the Internet-Draft is:
ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt

Internet-Drafts directories are located at:

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Internet-Drafts are also available by mail.

Send a message to:  [e-mail]. In the body type:
     "FILE /internet-drafts/draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt".

NOTE: The mail server at ds.internic.net can return the document in
      MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility.  To use this
      feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE"
      command.  To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack" or
      a MIME-compliant mail reader.  Different MIME-compliant mail readers
      exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
      "multipart" MIME messages (i.e., documents which have been split
      up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation on
      how to manipulate these messages.

For questions, please mail to [e-mail].


Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version
of the Internet-Draft.

ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt"><ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-crispin-imap-base-00.txt>