On Jul 7, 2008, at 1:40 PM, Robert Burrell Donkin wrote:
On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu>
wrote:
--On Monday, July 07, 2008 08:27:59 PM +0100 Robert Burrell Donkin
<robertburrelldonkin(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
<snip>
it seems unfortunate that this means that a separate port is
required
for sieve management. a compatible extension to IMAP would allow
sieve
management using the same URI.
That makes the assumption that sieve scripts live only in IMAP
servers,
which I don't think we want to do.
not at all :-)
the function contained in this protocol is really very trivial. i
doubt that any implementator using a storage mechanism other than IMAP
would bother creating an implementation rather than just reusing their
preferred protocol at the application level. for example, HTTP is a
well known protocol whose secruity characterics are know well
understood. sieve maintainance using RESTful HTTP would be much
simpler than creating an implementations of this novel protocol.
There are at least a dozen client and server implementations of this
protocol that exist and interoperate and have been doing so for
several years, so on that issue your point is negated by fact.
Further, HTTP is dramatically more complicated than this protocol, and
I challenge the notion that its security is actually well understood
enough to be applied to other applications without some seriously
thorough and careful thinking. The only thing HTTP really buys you is
the ability to re-use existing HTTP server frameworks. This is
generally not a benefit to authors of email software, since most of us
have already written our own server frameworks for IMAP and SMTP and
the like.
Aaron