Subject: Re: Missing requirement in draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch? (was Re: New Version Notification - draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch-05.txt)

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 10:18:09 -0500

On 4/1/13 4:41 PM, Robert Sparks wrote:
> On 3/28/13 1:17 PM, SM wrote:
>> At 05:13 28-03-2013, Burger Eric wrote:
>>> I use the IMAP interface once, mark a bunch of things as read, and 
>>> then decide never to use the IMAP interface ever again. How long 
>>> does the server need to keep my (per-user) marking metadata? E.g., 
>>> besides CPU and I/O issues, there is a potentially unbounded storage 
>>> problem as well. It is unbounded because in IMAP I can assign any 
>>> kind of label (marking) to a message, even ones I make up.
>>>
>>> One thought for an approach to a solution:
>>> 1. per-user markings expire after X time units (six months?)
>>> 2. per-user markings may take up at most X storage units (512KB?)
>>
>> I would go for both.
>
> Instead, I propose that we make it possible to notice an abuser and 
> turn off access (this is what -06 will contain).
>
> I don't believe we could come to a consensus on an automatic expiry of 
> state - there are use cases I can think of where any short
> expiration (like 6-months) would be infuriating.
>
> If keeping this state for normal use turns out to be too expensive for 
> us, then we will have learned something, and can start talking about 
> future IMAP work in general to help systems mitigate that expense.

During my IESG Evaluation review of the document, I noticed the 
resultant paragraph for this. I don't know how I missed it before. Here 
is what I said in my ballot:

---

    o  It must be possible for administrators, on a per-user basis, to
       disable setting read/unread marks and other annotations and to
       delete any such marks or annotations.

I don't think that's the appropriate requirement. A perfectly reasonable 
way to address the issue of annotations taking up too much space is to 
use per-user storage quotas. I would prefer not to give administrators 
the ability or the need to decide which users get to use annotations and 
which users' annotations they get to delete. And I can imagine servers 
for which implementing this requirement would be a significant pain. 
Quotas solve the problem in a much more general way.

---

I wanted to post here to make sure that folks who were involved in the 
earlier discussion saw what I was suggesting and had a chance to object 
if they thought I was full of crap.

pr

-- 
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:03:33 +0100

On 26/06/2013 16:18, Pete Resnick wrote:
>>>> besides CPU and I/O issues, there is a potentially unbounded 
>>>> storage problem as well. It is unbounded because in IMAP I can 
>>>> assign any kind of label (marking) to a message, even ones I make up.
>>>>
>> I don't believe we could come to a consensus on an automatic expiry 
>> of state - there are use cases I can think of where any short
>> If keeping this state for normal use turns out to be too expensive 
>> for us, then we will have learned something, and can start talking 
>> about future IMAP work in general to help systems mitigate that expense.
>
> resultant paragraph for this. I don't know how I missed it before. 
> Here is what I said in my ballot:
>
> ---
>
> I don't think that's the appropriate requirement. A perfectly 
> reasonable way to address the issue of annotations taking up too much 
> space is to use per-user storage quotas. I would prefer not to give 
> administrators the ability or the need to decide which users get to 
> use annotations and which users' annotations they get to delete. And I 
> can imagine servers for which implementing this requirement would be a 
> significant pain. Quotas solve the problem in a much more general way.

Yes, this requirement is a bit of a pain. Quotas would make it easier 
for my implementation.

> earlier discussion saw what I was suggesting and had a chance to 
> object if they thought I was full of crap.