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List:       imap
Subject:    Re: message state preservation in COPY and APPEND operations
From:       John Gardiner Myers <jgm+ () cmu ! edu>
Date:       1993-07-16 2:48:29
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Mark Crispin <MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU> writes:
> Then that leaves us with the problem of APPEND.  We can extend APPEND to have
> a flags argument.  However, that leaves the question of what to do when the
> server returns BAD because it's a server written for the previous spec.

The client then has to fall back to using APPEND without the flags
argument.

The message will be inserted without the flags set, but this is then
the same situation you have when you do a COPY on a server written for
the "don't copy flags" interpretation of the previous spec.

> I consider it to be of *utmost* importance to have consistant behavior across
> all variants of IMAP.  Differences in version should be differences in
> functionality, not differences in fundamental behavior.

I'm not quite sure why the inability to preserve flags is a difference
in "fundamental behavior" instead of a difference in "functionality."

As it is now, you have inconsistent behavior WITHIN a given version of
c-client.  Whether or not you can even use user-defined flags varies
between mailbox to mailbox, depending on what the underlying storage
format is.


Even if we do decide that flags should be preserved, there are some
cases where servers that support fine-grained access control will want
to fail to preserve them.  If a user is allowed to COPY/APPEND a
message into a folder, yet is not allowed to do a SET FLAGS on that
folder, the server should not preserve the flags on the inserted
message.

-- 
_.John G. Myers		Internet: jgm+@CMU.EDU
			LoseNet:  ...!seismo!ihnp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!give!up

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