Subject: Re: [imapext] New Version Notification for draft-iceman-imap-specialuse-important-00.txt

From: Michael M Slusarz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:25:42 -0700

Quoting Pete Maclean <[email-masked]>:

> I am with Cyrus in that I would like to see this new flag defined a  
> little more tightly.  I have major customers who are unhappy about  
> the lack of specificity of existing IMAP flags.

A bit late to the party here, and this doesn't directly relate to the  
\Important flag, but the draft also discusses the more general  
Special-use Attributes registry so figure it was worth a mention.

As has been mentioned by others, many of the special-use flags are  
lacking in specificity.  Coupled with the fact that multiple mailboxes  
can contain the same flag, e.g. a MUA supporting multiple personal  
identities might use a different sent-mail mailbox for each identity,  
the special-use flags are not tremendously useful from a client's  
point of view.

The flags would become more useful if there was a mechanism to  
identify the "preferred" mailbox for each of the defined flags.  In  
other words: a way to identify if these preferred mailboxes are the  
system/server default.  This would greatly aid in allowing a client to  
(automatically) setup sane defaults when doing the initial  
configuration.  Clients would continue to be free to label mailboxes  
as they see fit (if CREATE-SPECIAL-USE is available) allowing, for  
example, showing a special icon for all mailboxes labeled as sent-mail.

Just some thoughts I've had while trying to figure out how to  
integrate special-use flags from a client perspective.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [[email-masked]]