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List:       imap
Subject:    RE: RFC 2192: dormant or dead?
From:       Bill McCoy <Bill.McCoy () PictureIQ ! com>
Date:       2003-04-18 21:30:57
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Larry, thanks, yes I have located some documentation of both persistent and
transient registration for IE:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/networking/plugg
able/overview/overview.asp - these pages also confirm my suspicion that
"imap:" isn't one of the built-in protocols. Although since the built-in
list includes such these-days  obscure protocols as "gopher:" and "res:"
(fetch resource from DLL), there may be a good case that "imap:" should be a
built-in. Especially since having to muck around with COM objects and even
worse the registry database isn't really a viable option for mass-published
content. Flash and PDF are the exceptions to the general rule that if it
ain't built-in to IE (in the old days, IE andNetscape), it ain't gonna be
widely used. Generally content publishers know that trying to get people to
click OK to that "Do you want to install..." (much less click the "Always
trust... Button") greatly reduces their market. IMAP is a foundational
Internet protocol so leaving it unsupported in  IE seems less than ideal,
especially when the IMAP protocol code already ships with IE (via Outlook
Express).

--Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Osterman [mailto:larryo@Exchange.Microsoft.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 1:45 PM
To: Bill McCoy; Mark Crispin; daboo@cyrusoft.com
Cc: imap@u.washington.edu
Subject: RE: RFC 2192: dormant or dead?


The good news w.r.t. imap: tags in IE is that I believe that the support for
protocol tags like news:, nntp:, etc is configurable and documented, so an
app that wants to be registered as the handler for these can add this
support.


Larry Osterman 


-----Original Message-----
From: IMAP-owner@u.washington.edu [mailto:IMAP-owner@u.washington.edu]
On Behalf Of Bill McCoy
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 1:29 PM
To: 'Mark Crispin'; 'daboo@cyrusoft.com'
Cc: 'imap@u.washington.edu'
Subject: RE: RFC 2192: dormant or dead?

Mark and Cyrus, thank you very much for the replies.

Of course Mark's right that any client can choose to parse IMAP URLs and
perform the IMAP protocol and (what I hadn't thought through) a client that
doesn't support IMAP URLs wouldn't magically know to transform an IMAP URL
into an HTTP GET request, since that mapping's unspecified. In other words,
RFC 2192 only says how to encode IMAP data in URL form rather than defining
a new way to access IMAP data from a standard HTTP browser - I had thought
there was some intent for IMAP servers to directly support IMAP URLs
transformed into a HTTP GET request but that's not in the spec and (now that
I think about it) doesn't follow; my bad, sorry.

Internet Explorer in Windows XP unfortunately doesn't appear to support IMAP
URLs directly; on a system with Pine installed an IMAP URL such as
"imap://cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu/archive.imap" IE does launch Pine, presumably
based on helper-application association, but in the normal case it seems to
just not work. Similarly Mozilla 1.0.1 on RedHat 8.0 doesn't seem to be
willing to handle an IMAP URL. So perhaps the real answer to my question
is:
"While IMAP URLs are supported in a few mail clients and as an IMAP
client-server data exchange format for certain IMAP extensions, Web browsers
haven't chosen to support them and thus they are not really usable today for
their primary intended purpose, i.e. as a peer to "news:" / "nntp:" / "ftp:"
URLs in HTML links". Anyway, I hope that I am mistaken on this front as
well...

--Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Crispin [mailto:mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU] 
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 10:18 AM
To: Bill McCoy
Cc: 'imap@u.washington.edu'
Subject: Re: RFC 2192: dormant or dead?


On Fri, 18 Apr 2003, Bill McCoy wrote:
> But RFC 3300 lists 2192 as "Proposed" rather than
> "Standard" or "Draft Standard"

That means that 2192 is standards-track.  The current IMAP specification is
also "Proposed".  It takes many years for a standards-track document to
advance to Full Standard.

> and as far as I can tell it is unimplemented
> in popular IMAP server or web servers.

IMAP URLs would not be implemented in IMAP servers.  They would be
implemented in clients that do URLs.

Pine is a client that implements IMAP URLs.  I suspect that IE does too.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

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