On Oct 26, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
Beyond that, email messages are generally large (compared to calendar
entries, anyway) collections of text. Changes to messages mostly involve
small deltas to metadata.
Note that messages in IMAP are immutable; we don't have to worry about
changes to a message.
And thanks for quoting that previous text. I got a bit aggressive with the
delete key and lost the message I was going to reply to :-P
My comment about the incremental metadata changes being a small part of the
equation was something I did not explain clearly. What I was getting at – and
should have spelled out to being with – is that the major operation in the
context of IMAP is the operation of moving a message from one folder to
another. This is a full-on COPY+DELETE operation; you are instantiating an
entirely new message, then destroying the original. Under the hood, this is
considerably more than just fiddling with the meta-data. There is no
equivalent to UNIX's link(2) that MH can use to shortcut the process. I.e.,
you cannot reuse things like inode numbers, stat(2) data, or most anything
else, other than the immutability property of the message itself.
And because IMAP messages are immutable, anno(1) fails miserably in the
presence of an IMAP message store. Yes, there are some IMAP extensions that
can help here, but any solution we implement would have to work with a server
that implements only the base 3501 specification.
--lyndon
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