Re: A little help from my friends

[Jochen_Hayek@ACM.org]

>>>>> "KG" == Kai Grossjohann <Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE> writes:

KG> Nathan Williams <nwilliams@primeon.com> writes:

    >> Does your IMAP server know that these are 'subfolders', or is it
    >> just a result of your naming convention?

    KG> What do you mean by subfolder?

Well, IMAP4rev1 *does* know the concept of subfolders and folder hierarchies.

Don't ask me which one of the `free' IMAP servers actually implements it and how.

If I understand it correctly,
it shouldn't be necessary to know the hierarchy separator character in advance,
because the LIST response tells this character:

   Example:    S: * LIST (\Noselect) "/" ~/Mail/foo

Here the `/' is the hierarchy separator character.

But I don't know (and do somehow doubt it)
how / whether / that IMAP clients don't enforce the user
to specify the full path names (including the separator character).

    KG> nnimap:INBOX lives in the directory
    KG> /var/spool/imap/user/kai on disk (one msg per file), and
    KG> nnimap:INBOX.auto.gnus.imap is
    KG> /var/spool/imap/user/kai/auto/gnus/imap.

    KG> As you can see, I'm using
    KG> Cyrus...

    KG> But if you are suggesting that nnimap:foo should contain a superset of
    KG> the messages in nnimap:foo.bar and nnimap:foo.baz -- no, that's not
    KG> it.

    KG> Is there such a concept in IMAP?

See above.

And as I understand it, it's even worse in a sense:
a folder name can also be at the same time a hierarchy level (i.e. `directory name')
of other (sub)folders.