Re: one solution to replacing articles

[John Prevost <prevost@maya.com>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se> writes:

> After writing down the idea below I decided it was too cludgy, but I'd
> like to keep the idea for future reference if I change my mind. And
> internet is a great distributed database so just mail it out and never
> worry about not be able to find it again... :-)

<grin>

Not necessarily too kludgy, but could be slow in some circumstances.
The servers I know of either cache a subset of the headers for fast
searching, or do no caching at all.  That could mean that searching
for the appropriate header would be far too slow.

The other thing that's been itching at the back of my mind for some
time while reading this thread is that no matter what the editing
mechanism provided is, there needs to be another mechanism for doing
some "fixes".

The specific reason that comes to mind is the not insignificant number
of read-only mailboxes I have on my server for mailing list archives
and the like.  Since these are shared mailboxes, I don't even have the
ability (on Cyrus, anyway) to add non-standard flags to messages.

That being said, I do think it would be interesting if we could come
up with some mechanism, maybe similar to the one below, for annotating
messages with extra information.  Especially if it could be done in a
manner both efficient and not requiring anything that IMAP clients
aren't already required to understand.

If this could be done, it might even be possible to push it at the
IETF as a propsed extension.

John.