Re: What to do about SEARCH?

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On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 12:37:17PM -0600, Charles Cazabon wrote:
> The spec has had an unspecified SEARCH command for a while now.  I'd like=
 to
> either fill this out, or remove the command.  I don't know which to do.

I vote to remove the command from the first spec, to be added in a ".1"
spec.  I do agree it is useful, but how useful in reality, and how
expensive will it be to add?

> However, to do any kind of meaningful content search, the server almost
> certainly has to parse and un-MIME-ify a message, because otherwise any
> content transfer encoding other than 7bit or 8bit would cause false negat=
ives
> or false positives.  This is really ugly.

To do any kind of body searching, you will need to do a full message
parse and decoding even (for base64 and quoted-unreadable encodings).

> Then, if search is necessary, what form does it take?  Simple substring
> matches?  Full-blown pcre?  Somewhere in between?

I'd vote for glob over PCRE.  There have been some security issues found
in pcre, and mandating that a server MUST use something that complex is
just asking for problems.  Advanced clients can emulate some of PCRE by
doing a more inclusive glob and picking out the parts with PCRE locally.
--=20
Bruce Guenter <[email protected]> http://em.ca/~bruceg/ http://untroubled.org/
OpenPGP key: 699980E8 / D0B7 C8DD 365D A395 29DA  2E2A E96F B2DC 6999 80E8

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