Re: I-D ACTION:draft-neystadt-imap-status-counters-00.txt

"Neystadt, John" <[email protected]>
> This is today handled on clients and is used to display counters either in
> folders tree or on some general summary screen. 
> There are two main benefits of moving this logic to server:
> 
> - in order to build them you must screen all message headers in the mailbox,
> this is very slow and traffic intensive if done on client

That sounds as if you're using FETCH HEADER.FIELDS() or something today.
If that's true, I can certaing agree that a change is desirable ;)

However, a SEARCH should avoid network traffic almost completely, cut down
on the amount of the client must do, and be at least as good for the
server. (I'm assuming that on a server, searching for flags will be at
least as fast as downloading all messages - usually quite a bit faster.)

> - server can store the counters and then incrementally update the counters
> when new messages are delivered (in MTA) or expunged and server do different
> clients. This saves much of processing power for servers.

Well, maybe. OTOH, most server authors might not want to write code to
speed unusual special cases, and then the VPIM client has to the slow code
anyway.

If you need an extension, better try to design it so that a lot of clients
will benefit from it and the incentive to implement it is correspondingly
strong.

--Arnt
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