Fundamental question about subscribe/unsubscribe
use...@isbd.co.uk
exactly and what are they for?
I have one idea which seems to be the way that some MUAs treat them
but I'm not convinced it's the actual intention of these commands.
This is that only subscribed folders/mailboxes will be visible in the
MUA and thus it's a way of masking out unwanted folders which might
otherwise be visible. In particular this is useful with, for example,
UW Imap where the whole file system on the remote server where UW Imap
is running can be seen.
However I seem to remember reading somewhere that this is *not* the
intention of subscribe/unsubscribe so I'd like the concept clarified.
It's certainly a bit of a pain to actually use in practice with many
MUAs that I've played with. For example I have recently been playing
with Thunderbird and when it first connected to my remote IMAP server
all I could see was the INBOX, I had to explicitly subscribe to every
other folder if I wanted to see its contents and there was no way to
subscribe to the whole hierarchy recursively, a total pain in the
proverbial.
On the other hand my MUA of choice (mutt) seems basically to ignore
subscribe/unsubscribe and shows me all the folders I expect to see
straight away without problems.
--
Chris Green
Mark Crispin
> The question is basically - what do subscribe and unsubscribe mean
> exactly and what are they for?
It's a collection of mailbox names that you want to maintain separate from
"all possible names". It's mostly useful for newsgroups.
Certain extremely poorly-designed and written clients things that it's
supposed to be used for something else. Certain very badly-written
clients do a recursive listing of all possible mailboxes and subscribe
them all, not realizing that links can cause loop in the tree. The "%"
wildcard in IMAP exists for a reason, but the authors of these poorly
written clients have not figured out that reason.
> It's certainly a bit of a pain to actually use in practice with many
> MUAs that I've played with. For example I have recently been playing
> with Thunderbird and when it first connected to my remote IMAP server
> all I could see was the INBOX, I had to explicitly subscribe to every
> other folder if I wanted to see its contents and there was no way to
> subscribe to the whole hierarchy recursively, a total pain in the
> proverbial.
It sounds like Thunderbird is one of those poorly-written clients.
> On the other hand my MUA of choice (mutt) seems basically to ignore
> subscribe/unsubscribe and shows me all the folders I expect to see
> straight away without problems.
Pine behaves this way too.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
use...@isbd.co.uk
> On Wed, 25 May 2005, use...@isbd.co.uk wrote:
> > The question is basically - what do subscribe and unsubscribe mean
> > exactly and what are they for?
>
> It's a collection of mailbox names that you want to maintain separate from
> "all possible names". It's mostly useful for newsgroups.
>
actually read the IMAP4 RFC (not as opaque as some actually).
Although it doesn't explicitly state it all the examples of the use of
SUBSCRIBE are for newsgoups.
> Certain extremely poorly-designed and written clients things that it's
> supposed to be used for something else. Certain very badly-written
> clients do a recursive listing of all possible mailboxes and subscribe
> them all, not realizing that links can cause loop in the tree. The "%"
> wildcard in IMAP exists for a reason, but the authors of these poorly
> written clients have not figured out that reason.
>
It's not just that, many clients seem to show you only SUBSCRIBed
groups *and* only let you subscribe to one at a time.
At least I can now complain to MUA writers that their way of doing
things is simply wrong, let alone inconvenient.
--
Chris Green
Joseph Brennan
>> It's a collection of mailbox names that you want to maintain separate from
>> "all possible names". It's mostly useful for newsgroups.
It's uselessly late to say so, but the IMAP RFC should have contained
some comment about what they are for.
On 2005-05-26, use...@isbd.co.uk <use...@isbd.co.uk> wrote:
> It's not just that, many clients seem to show you only SUBSCRIBed
> groups *and* only let you subscribe to one at a time.
You slightly misstate the Netscape/Thunderbird usage of subscribed
folders, although your misunderstanding demonstrates perfectly why
their interface is so bad.
The client defaults to showing only subscribed folders, but it does
not say so by means of any icon or label. It comes as a surprise to
people when they learn that the list of mail folders they see is not a
list of their mail folders. We have had Pine users who take for
granted that they cannot see their Pine folders with Netscape! After
all, Netscape does not show them.
But you can actually configure Netscape to show all folders, if you
can find where to do it. The catch is that if you do so, at startup
Netscape insists on spending time listing all the folders, so if you
happen to have a lot of list-able folders, you quickly switch back to
showing only subscribed folders, to save time.
It would not be nearly so bad if the list were headed SUBSCRIBED
FOLDERS and there was some obvious clickable SEE ALL FOLDERS option.
This would clue people to what's going on.
Joseph Brennan Academic Information Systems
Columbia University in the City of New York
bre...@columbia.edu
use...@isbd.co.uk
> > Mark Crispin <M...@cac.washington.edu> wrote, of subscribed folders,
> >> It's a collection of mailbox names that you want to maintain separate from
> >> "all possible names". It's mostly useful for newsgroups.
>
> It's uselessly late to say so, but the IMAP RFC should have contained
> some comment about what they are for.
>
documentation, there is a complete description of the details of
something in terms of its syntax etc. but nothing that tells you the
purpose of the particular item/command. It's common in books on
programming languages as well and also in comments in code. However
in the particular case of programming languages there are often other
books which address the 'why' so you can use one book to understand
the syntax and another to address how to do things.
This seems to be singularly lacking in the case of IMAP4, there is
virtually no 'why/how' documentation and the result is lots of clients
(and servers for that matter) that don't quite agree on how it's all
supposed to work.
--
Chris Green