Pete Maclean (aaddict@maclean.com)
Mon, 17 Dec 2001 12:43:56 -0500
>What's a "true name"? Consider that an IMAP inbox is a name for what is
>sometimes a virtual entity that doesn't have one single location on the
>server. So I find it difficult to expect this.
I don't have much experience with such situations but I certainly do
appreciate that an inbox may not have a name in the sense I am talking
about and that it could indeed be a totally virtual entity. But what I
mean by "true name" is, to put it very precisely, the name of the message
container that the IMAP server refers to as "INBOX" as it is known within
the domain of the mailstore that it is part of -- if there is in fact such
a container and if it actually has a name by which it is identified within
its mailstore.
Let me give a concrete example. My IMAP server has a MAPI interface among
others. (MAPI is Microsoft's Messaging API.) This means that it can serve
up messages from any mailstore that implements a MAPI Store-Provider
interface. Everything in IMAP maps neatly into MAPI except that MAPI has
nothing equivalent to IMAP's \Recent flag (which does not matter). I am
not certain off-hand if MAPI demands that all folders have names, but in
all cases I have seen they certainly do. Now MAPI includes a method called
GetReceiveFolder that identifies the "default receive folder for the
message store". This does not exactly match IMAP's definition for inbox
but it's close enough that I have always assumed they should be considered
equivalent. GetReceiveFolder returns an internal id from which one can
then derive the folder's name. I would like to be able to feed that name
back to the client. Of course, as Lyndon pointed out so well, it should be
up to the client and/or the user to choose whether that name should
actually be used in the client context, but it seems desirable that this
should at least be possible.
To concretize this issue a little more, with the English-language
installation of Microsoft's Personal Folders, the folder identified by
GetReceiveFolder is always "Inbox" -- so it happens to be no big
deal. With the German-language installation however the folder is named
"Posteingang".
Pete
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Mon Dec 17 2001 - 19:44:31 IST