Re: [Jmap] Hacker News Discussion - getMailboxes single data set vs tree primitives or paging

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 9 May 2017, at 00:14, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> It's not clear that mailboxes really need to be hierarchical, and we've 
> seen that the hierarchy stuff wasn't really well implemented by IMAP 
> clients.
> 
> It seems plausible that polling the complete list oftenish is unacceptable 
> for at least some users, but an IMAP-like hierarchy is not the only way to 
> cut bandwidth usage. Retrieving it once and then asking for updates would 
> work too, like JMAP's in-mailbox updates.
> 
> Servers that don't have a global modseq or some other generation counter 
> would have to fall back to sending all/many mailboxes.

So if we have just a single sort (fullpath) and an optional filter on parentId plus windowing we can handle either nested or flat folder structures very easily and handle upteen million mailboxes comfortably as well.

It seems viable to implement this even if you're doing depth-first traversal of a folder listing on a filesystem with no other smarts required, you can always use the path of the folder as the "id", though it will obviously not survive renames, so you miss that benefit.

Bron.

-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  [e-mail]