On Feb 24, 2010, at 2:48 PM, WJCarpenter wrote:
Subscriptions themselves aren't an abuse of IMAP, obviously, as
they are in the spec. A client that *by default* uses them to hide
folders is abusing them, for exactly the reasons I explained. They
are non-portable because:
I agree 100% that hiding folders by default is bad, but I've never
seen a client do that. I have seen many clients hide folders that
are not subscribed, and that's exactly the behavior that I want.
(If you don't have a subscription list, you see everything. If you
have a subscription list, that's what you see.)
Right, I understand that's the behavior that you want, which is your
choice. I'm arguing (from years of bitter experience) that for the
average user, it leads to a lot more problems than it solves.
Are these problems with subscriptions or folder handling in
general? In every client I've looked at, a subscription is just a
visibility marker for a folder. When the folder is visible, it
shows up in whatever place the client would put it if there were no
such thing as subscriptions. Are you saying there are clients that
make these UI problem just for subscribed folders?
Most of these clients are bad at folder handling in general, but these
issues are specifically with subscriptions. Using it as a visibility
marker is great if you can count on consistent interpretation of the
contents of the subscription file, but if you are moving between
different clients (which almost everybody does: one or two at home,
one at work, webmail, mobile device...) you can't count on that.
So... some clients prepend the "IMAP root" to LSUB command paths, some
don't. Some prepend the "IMAP root" to return values from LSUB, some
don't. Some further have inconsistent (both internally and vis a vis
other contents) models for how they further interpret these in light
of NAMESPACE values. Etc. Etc.
It's just a mess.
-Brian
