From: Mark Crispin Newsgroups: comp.mail.imap Subject: Re: three confirmed Courier bugs Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2002 13:36:54 -0700 Organization: Networks and Distributed Computing Lines: 44 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva0.cac.washington.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: nntp6.u.washington.edu 1023309417 73440 (None) 140.142.17.38 X-Complaints-To: help@cac.washington.edu In-Reply-To: Content-Length: 314159 (believe this at your own risk) On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Sam wrote: > The server complies with the protocol specification, without complying with > its stupid design flaws. This is > > There is nothing in the protocol specification that says that one value is > > a "starting position" and the other is an "ending position". > That's how a numerical range is defined: starting value and and ending > value. Again, review your grade school Mathematics course book, for > additional information. A grade school Mathematics course book is not normative for the IMAP protocol specification or, as far as I know, any other protocol specification. Nowhere in the IMAP specification does it say that n:m syntax refers to "starting value and ending value". The IMAP specification says "between two numbers inclusive". > > Courier's implementation breaks UID clients (no, not Pine) which send n:* > > where n is one greater than the previous maximum UID. > Clients that do that are already broken, by the time they've ever gotten > this far. The other client and server implementors do not agree with you. > I might owe something to my users, but since you're not one of them you > really are no position to demand anything, no matter who you think you are. Most unfortunately, I have to communicate with the broken Courier IMAP server in order to retrieve my invoices and payment records from my ISP. So I *am* one of your users. I want to retrieve them to an embedded device, but Courier's bugs preclude interoperability with that device's IMAP client. I am obliged to access that server with Pine (which, if one is careful, can work with Courier), transfer the messages to a UW or Cyrus server, and then transfer them to the embedded device. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.