On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 10:19:17PM +0200, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
[Jutta Degener]:
Hm. That's a reasonable offer, Kjetil, but I'd rather eat the
complexity as an implementor than to place it on the users and
client writers by making this be an implementation-specific
difference.
well, that is one side of it. the other side is that of the server
administrators. if you must support multipass searches in body, this
may be a performance hit for servers. the administrator has few
options: pray that people won't use it too often, buy more hardware
(RAM!), or turn off the body extension altogether.
I strongly feel that performance should be addressed on a global
level, not on the level of individual features.
An ISP might want to restrict, and a vendor of tools might offer
a way to restrict, the amount of time and memory used by a sieve
script's execution (or by an IMAP search, for that matter).
That's a good and safe thing to do.
Disabling individual features is a stopgap measure in the absence
of better tools, but while desperate ISPs will do it, we shouldn't
do it at the specification level.
(Neither should we specify mechanisms that are needlessly wasteful,
but I don't think these are.)
Jutta