Re: compctl whitespace changes

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 10,  6:36pm, Phil Pennock wrote:
> Subject: Re: compctl whitespace changes
> On 2001-08-10 at 15:56 +0000, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> > IMAP can use almost anything it likes as a hierarchy separator.  Don't
> > make claims for the whole protocol based on the courier implementation.
> 
> I was going on the documentation, not the implementation.  But I can
> well believe that they made overbroad claims.

There are two widely-used hierarchy delimiters, dot and slash.  Generally
servers that present a usenet-news-style hierarchy use dot, and those that
expose the filesystem hierarchy use slash.

But in reality, the hierarchy delimiter is reported by the server as part
of the protocol exchange with the client, so the only way to know how to
interpret a mailbox name is to actually use the protocol.

> So the only thing that can be said is "there exist directories which
> look like maildirs themselves, having their own {cur,new,tmp}/ sets,
> whose name starts with a dot, inside the main directory".  That's
> the only Maildir++ change which mutt might want to be aware of.  I had
> thought that more systems than just Courier used Maildir++.

It's entirely possible that there are other systems using it.  I'd just
never heard of it before.