Re: Last Call: draft-ietf-imapext-sort (INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - SORT AND THREAD EXTENSIONS) to Proposed Standard

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <[e-mail]>]

Stephane Bortzmeyer writes:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:26:44AM -0800,
>  Mark Crispin <[e-mail]> wrote a message of 162 lines which said:
>
>>  The actual correct collation, assuming(!) surname-first collation 
>>  and Latin character ordering(!!), is:
> ...
>>  due to where the surname is located in various cultures.
>
> Is it a good idea to sort on the ordering of the sender's culture? If 
> the ordering is to be useful for the human user, it should be 
> according the receiver's culture, no?

There's support for that. You have to read a few drafts and RFCs, though.

The draft in question defines a sort command and some sort keys, and it 
permits defining more sort keys. Other documents allow defining 
collations (sort orders) and using them im IMAP.

Sorting by From field the way most MUAs do requires defining a new 
collation and a new sort key, since this draft's "from" key uses only 
the localpart ('arnt' in the case of this message). Personally I think 
that sort key isn't at all fortunate, but it's too late to change that. 
There's decade-old running code already and the most important thing is 
to document the deployed extension.

Arnt