Re: [imapext] draft-ietf-appsawg-multimailbox-search

[Chris Newman <[e-mail]>]

--On March 6, 2014 9:30:17 -0500 Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]> wrote:
> --On March 6, 2014 at 10:42:15 AM +0000 Barry Leiba
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Chris Newman has asked that we consider moving the Multimailbox Search
>> extension to Standards Track (it was published as RFC 6237 as
>> Experimental).  Appsawg is handling that:
>
> If sufficient servers AND clients have bothered to implement
> multimailbox-search and they have proven to be interoperable then I see
> no objection to moving to standards track (i.e, the experiment was a
> success so lets move forward) - but can we see evidence of that first?

I have written a server implementation of MULTISEARCH that is not presently 
released. As a server vendor, I have had two independent requests for this 
feature. At least one of those requests is from a customer that is working 
on a client implementation. I can not name the customer.

> --On March 6, 2014 at 9:57:53 PM +1100 Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]> 
wrote:
>> Anyway - my main problem with it is that users don't just want search -
>> they want sort.  Running the search across multiple mailboxes means you
>> still need to fetch all the data for all the matches before you can get a
>> meaningful sort by any parameter other than mailbox name as the first
>> sort index.  And that can be a lot of download to the client if you
>> searched a common term.]
>
> On Bron's point - yes what is really needed is an extension that does
> away with the single selected mailbox model and allows searching,
> sorting, sync'ing, message access across all mailboxes all the time.

I have no interest in implementing such an extension at this time. I'm 
going to assert there is not enough interest in such a proposal to get a 
specification written, thus making it not relevant to this discussion. If 
someone were to prove my assertion wrong, then we could have an interesting 
discussion about whether one or both proposals should go to standards track.

For just searching, the current MULTISEARCH design has significant benefits 
for both client and server. It produces concise results (a UID set for each 
mailbox rather than list of UIDs), and the straightforward implementation 
will return results as they are found on a per-mailbox basis in a way that 
clients can display the results as they are found. The straightforward 
implementation of MULTISORT/ALLMSGS has to compute all the results before 
sending anything to the client. There's value to having these be separate 
extensions even if sufficient interest to write a MULTISORT/ALLMSGS 
extension materializes in the future.

		- Chris