Subject: [imap5] Existing RFCs - what do they solve, and how to solve those problems

From: Bron Gondwana <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:22:23 +0100

Before building something new, it helps understand what's already been
done and what problems it's solving - since I won't have seen every
problem that everyone is having.  I'm probably not the best standards
writer or the best programmer out there - but I'm driven do this bloody
thing!

I plan to build a list of all the RFCs which refer to the communications
between clients and servers.  http://www.imc.org/rfcs.html is a good
starting point.  I want to capture things like ACAP and SIEVE as well.

I plan to build a table with:

a) RFC Number and title
b) Problem being solved
c) Plan to handle that same problem

Now it may be that (c) is "won't deal with it", or "won't exist because
it's a workaround for a deficiency which won't exist".  I'm hoping for
more of the latter.

I went to a great talk by Damien Conway about rewriting all his CPAN
Perl modules for Perl6 (yes, yes - I know, it doesn't even exist yet).
Fully half of his modules were workarounds for deficiencies in perl5
which just don't exist in perl6, so they don't need to be ported.
Of the rest, many were cut down to fewer than half the number of lines
of code due to the increased expressivity of the new language.

I hope many of the extension RFCs for IMAP will fall under the same
patterns - simpler to implement if required at all.

I'll post more here as the list of RFCs is put together.  I'm
particularly hoping to make sure I don't miss any relevant RFCs:

http://imapwiki.org/ImapRFCList

Bron.

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From: Joshua Cranmer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:13:53 -0600

> starting point.  I want to capture things like ACAP and SIEVE as well.
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Related_Standards> is a list that I 
made and others extended over the years. Looking back on it, I realize 
that it completely omits all of the MIME specifications; some recent 
work I did on a MIME parser produced the following list of stuff (this 
does more than just MIME):
// * RFC 2045 -- MIME Part 1, Format of Internet Message Bodies
// * RFC 2046 -- MIME Part 2, Media Types
// * RFC 5322 -- Internet Message Format (see also RFC 2822, RFC 822)
// * RFC 5536 -- Netnews Article Format (see also RFC 1036)
// * RFC 2047 -- MIME Part 3, Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text
// * RFC 2231 -- MIME Parameter Value and Encoded Word Extensions
// * RFC 5335 -- Internationalized Email Headers
//   XXX: RFC 5335bis (Downgrading was removed from EAI, so...)
// * Uuencode -- No spec for this? Wikipedia doesn't list a reference
// * <http://www.yenc.org/yenc-draft.1.3.txt> -- yEnc "specification"
// * <http://files.stairways.com/other/binhex-40-specs-info.txt> -- BinHex
// * XXX: find refs for PGP, S/MIME, TNEF
// * XXX: 2646/3676 (f=f?), 3798/? (mdn), ??? (cid, mhtml, etc.)

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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From: Bron Gondwana <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:56:19 +0100

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 03:13:53PM -0600, Joshua Cranmer wrote:
> <https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Related_Standards> is a list that
> I made and others extended over the years. Looking back on it, I
> realize that it completely omits all of the MIME specifications;
> some recent work I did on a MIME parser produced the following list
> of stuff (this does more than just MIME):

Excellent.  Added to my list of stuff to look over!  I'll make sure I
haven't missed anything from there too.

Bron.

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From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:52:50 +0000

> haven't missed anything from there too.
Also have a look at www.rfc-editor.org (e.g. search for "IMAP").