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- Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited.
-
- Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 07:38:29 -0700 (PDT)
- From: Terry Gray <gray@cac.washington.edu>
- Subject: IMAP WG Minutes
-
- Minutes of the IMAP (Internet Message Access protocol) Working Group
- Meeting at the 30th IETF (Toronto)
-
- 26 Jul 1994
- 1600-1800
-
- Twenty-five people attended.
-
- The document author described a few terminology clarifications he made
- since the last version of the draft. References to "message numbers"
- and "sequence numbers" are now uniformly changed to "message sequence
- numbers", and the term "sets" is now used for lists or ranges of message
- sequence numbers.
-
- The principal agenda item was to discuss issues raised by John Klensin
- (our Area Advisor) during his review of the IMAP4 spec. in perparation
- for submission as a Proposed Standard. John raised the following issues:
-
- o The document is hard to follow, because you must continually refer
- back and forth between the commands, responses, and syntax sections of
- the document.
-
- --> Result: rationale for current organization discussed (it's oriented
- toward the way an implementation would be written). Need for IMAP
- tutorial acknowledged. No change to doc. organization will be made
- at this time.
-
- o The document needs a few more words at the beginning under a heading
- titled "How to read this document." Especially the fact that you *must*
- consult the grammar to do an implementation.
-
- --> Result: text to be added.
-
- o Another sentence or two is needed to clarify cases where the optional
- keyword MAILBOX is included in a command (for backward compatibility);
- e.g. is there a difference between "subscribe mailbox" and subscribe
- mailbox mailbox"?
-
- --> Result: text to be added.
-
- o The 30 min minimum value for an autologout timer on a server was
- thought to be too long in certain dialup contexts.
-
- --> Result: After extensive discussion, four options were identified:
- -Remove ref to any timeout value in the spec. (Bad because value
- needed to set upper bound for client keep-alive processing.)
- -Change value to something other than 30 min. (No consensus on
- what a better minimum would be.)
- -Have the server probe the client. (Dangerous because of potential
- for flow control deadlock!)
- -Create command to allow client to tell server what timeout
- value should be. (Agreed, but not in base document. Rob
- Austein to propose --the first!-- new CAPABILITY extension.)
-
- o There needs to be a small amount of meta-wording added to explain
- that a subsequent document describing a protocol modification or
- extension (new CAPABILITY) can over-ride or modify the behavior
- described in the base spec, but that new extensions (CAPABILITIES) only
- modify the base spec behavior by mutual consent of the client and
- server. This is similar to the SMTP extensions model.
-
- --> Result: text to be added.
-
- Also, an agreement was reached on modified wording concerning handling
- of zero-length literals.
-
- NEXT STEPS...
-
- Draft version -05, incorporating the above changes, will appear within a
- few days. Thence John Klensin will request a "Last Call for Proposed
- Standard" notification for the following three documents:
-
- o The base IMAP4 spec (standards track)
- o John Myers' doc on a way to use the Authenticate cmd (standards track)
- o The compatibility document (to be issued as an "Informational" RFC)
-
- Everyone is requested to look at the last two ASAP for any final suggestions.
-
- After the Last Call interval, assuming no major problems surface, John K.
- will initiate balloting of the IESG on the above three docs.
-
- Also, Rob Austein requested more feedback on the informational "How to use
- IMAP4 for Disconnected Operation" document, which is not yet ready for
- publishing.
-
- That's it. In all, a very successful meeting.
-
-