Rather than guessing all of the bad things that could happen, I would offer it
would be better to say what we mean, like:
The IMAP interface MUST NOT provide any IMAP facilities that modify the
underlying message and message metadata, such as mailbox, flags, marking for
deletion, etc. If the client is authenticated and authorized, the IMAP
interface MUST provide per-user marking of the underlying message as read or
flagged.
Something to ponder:
I use the IMAP interface once, mark a bunch of things as read, and then decide
never to use the IMAP interface ever again. How long does the server need to
keep my (per-user) marking metadata? E.g., besides CPU and I/O issues, there is
a potentially unbounded storage problem as well. It is unbounded because in
IMAP I can assign any kind of label (marking) to a message, even ones I make up.
One thought for an approach to a solution:
1. per-user markings expire after X time units (six months?)
2. per-user markings may take up at most X storage units (512KB?)
Per-user metadata can be incredibly useful - I might label things by project,
work group, draft, mumble, or foo. I would not want to limit the labels to red
or green. However, we need some predictable limit as well.
Thoughts?
On Mar 27, 2013, at 4:31 PM, Robert Sparks <rjsparks(_at_)nostrum(_dot_)com>
wrote:
All -
draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch has been revised to address comments from
Pete Resnick and Barry Leiba. Jari Arkko has suggested that the security
considerations
section contain something like what RFC6778 contained about potential risks
to CPU
and I/O utilization. I plan to make that change in the next version.
While looking at it, I noticed we don't explicitly say that this IMAP
interface MUST NOT
allow messages in the archive to be deleted or moved to other mailboxes, and
MUST NOT
allow messages to be inserted. I plan to add those as requirements in the
next version.
RjS
On 3/26/13 3:45 PM, internet-drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org wrote:
A new version (-05) has been submitted for draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch-05.txt
The IETF datatracker page for this Internet-Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch/
Diff from previous version:
http://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-sparks-genarea-imaparch-05
IETF Secretariat.