Steve Hole (steve.hole@messagingdirect.com)
Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:48:46 -0700
On Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:46:34 +0200 "Neystadt, John" <John@comverse.com>
wrote:
> > > 5. IMAP: Add support for IDLE of multiple folders
>
> Well, you basically say - it is a client problem. Opening tens of
> connections for tens of visible mailboxes seems to me impractical and will
> severe damage server scalability. With my proposal, server can have a
> special optimized provisions (like subscribe for file system changes
> notifications) and it will be much more efficiently.
No it won't. If opening lots of connections impacts server scalability,
then your server isn't very vertically scalable. Our server routinely
handles many 10's of thousands of connections on a single server. You
need to think about how you do that, but that is a lot easier engineering
than thinking about how to reorganize the protocol semantics to support
multiple mailbox selected state semantics.
Frankly, if you don't think about how to properly handle large numbers of
TCP connections on NT servers, you have a serious scalability problem
anyway. Fix it in one place and you fix it in all places.
> Well, INBOX name is a part of IMAP standard. Sent Items is a paradigm used
> by all MUAs on all OSes, so ignoring it is impractical. Other folders are
> more controversial. However I think it is better to standardize
> controversial names as recommendation, since there is no harm for those MUAs
> who don't use it.
Our client has provided a means for the user to select the names of the
folders that they will use for various purposes like draft storage, sent
items, outbox, etc. and we ship with a default configuration that will
recommend folder names for this purpose. If the user doesn't like our
names, they can change them. If the organization wants to use a
different set of defaults, they can change them. If the user wants to
coordinate with the names used by some other client, then they can change
them. No big deal actually. I will note that after we allowed for
customization, we never got a single trouble report on the matter.
The problem comes when client writers try to mandate the names used for
such purposes. Stupid design decision I think. We could never get our
own customer base to agree on a set of names, much less agree with another
client vendor. It gets about a million times worse as soon as you deploy
internationally. Bottom line is that you can make recommendations here,
but you really can't enforce it. And, if you pick this as the hill to
die on ... you will die on it.
Cheers.
--- Steve Hole Chief Technical Officer - Electronic Billing and Payment Systems ACI Worldwide, Messaging Direct Mailto:Steve.Hole@MessagingDirect.com Phone: 780-424-4922
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu Dec 13 2001 - 20:49:51 IST