Re: nnimap RFC2342 support (IMAP4 Namespace)

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

On 31 Jan 2001, Steven E. Harris wrote:

>   nnimap+speakeasy:mailing-lists/gnus-ding
>
> my ISP changed servers and I had to manually move that to
>
>   nnimap+speakeasy:INBOX.mailing-lists.gnus-ding
>
> while MS Outlook just figured out the change without trouble. (Sorry
> to hold Outlook up in a positive light.)

Hm, what does "figured out the change" mean?  When a IMAP mailbox name
change, everything a mail clients knows about the mailbox must be
discarded.  Everything else would be asking for trouble...

What would a good solution be?  Gnus automatically detect when a
group has gone missing, and tries to see if various combinations
of the name has magically appeared?  I probably don't understand what
Outlook really does here.

> Today I stumbled upon RFC2342¹ - IMAP4 Namespace - that looks like it
> addresses this exact problem. Has anyone taken a look at this to see
> how hard it would be to add support to nnimap?

imap.el implement NAMESPACE, but I never found a way to make use of
it in nnimap.  Suggestions welcome.  The point is that Gnus probably
need to grok this concept for things to work.  I'm not sure I see
how NAMESPACE [1] would solve your problem, but re-reading my rants
above I probably didn't understand the problem.

One way to support NAMESPACE would be to connect backends with
topics.  So you would have this group topology populated automatically:

[nnimap:foobar]
  [private mailboxes]
  nnimap+foobar:INBOX.ding
  [shared mailboxes]
  nnimap+foobar:bb.dong
  [newsgroups]
  nnimap+foobar:#news.dang

but I'm not sure that's really an important feature.  The
nnslashdot<->topic coupling has made the idea a little more
interesting, but when I suggested it a long time ago, most
people thought they'd like to organize their own topics.

Hm, re-reading an old discussion on NAMESPACE [2] indicate
NAMESPACE could be nice in *server* buffer, I think this is the
most interesting prospect this far.

Ah well, enought rants. :)  What do you think?

[1] NAMESPACE is only a way for the server to indicate what kind of
mailbox hierarchies there are.  All it does is saying "All your
private mailboxes begin with INBOX", "All your newsgroups begin with
#news", "All shared folders on this server begin with bb."

[2] http://vic20.blipp.com/extundo/.nnimap-list/199810/msg00041.html
    (No, that's probably not the best URL for it :-))