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Do other IMAP servers implement RFC 2231 support for BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE?
It's been in my TODO for 5 years and today was the first time anyone
asked about it. Is it even a good idea to implement it, or why wasn't it
included in RFC 3501?

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Timo Sirainen wrote:

>Do other IMAP servers implement RFC 2231 support for BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE?
>  
>
Yes. I believe Cyrus Imapd implements it as well.

>It's been in my TODO for 5 years and today was the first time anyone
>asked about it. Is it even a good idea to implement it, or why wasn't it
>included in RFC 3501?
>
Probably because it wasn't widely deployed back then. And I wouldn't be 
surprised if there are bugs in handling parameter continuation.

As a side note, CONVERT has support for RFC 2231 as a SHOULD.

> Do other IMAP servers implement RFC 2231 support for
> BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE?
> It's been in my TODO for 5 years and today was the first time anyone
> asked about it. Is it even a good idea to implement it, or why wasn't
> it included in RFC 3501?

Yeah, Zimbra does.  The main impetus is the growing number of Mac mail
clients out there.  They're the only ones that really exercise it,
though we've also been seeing 2231 headers from some versions of
Thunderbird.  (One Thunderbird build even does 2231 headers with out-
of-order continuations, which was a pain in the ass to handle.)

Timo Sirainen writes:
> Do other IMAP servers implement RFC 2231 support for BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE?

I implemented it last year, due to practical necessity. I don't remember 
exact details. Something about MUA interoperability and non-ascii 
filenames.

> It's been in my TODO for 5 years and today was the first time anyone
> asked about it. Is it even a good idea to implement it, or why wasn't it
> included in RFC 3501?

IMO it's a good idea to implement it now that someone uses it. 
Personally I hoped that noone would ever use that syntax, and I think 
Mark feels the same way.

Arnt

On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 07:01 -0700, Dan Karp wrote:
> > Do other IMAP servers implement RFC 2231 support for
> > BODY/BODYSTRUCTURE?
> > It's been in my TODO for 5 years and today was the first time anyone
> > asked about it. Is it even a good idea to implement it, or why wasn't
> > it included in RFC 3501?
> 
> Yeah, Zimbra does.  The main impetus is the growing number of Mac mail
> clients out there.  They're the only ones that really exercise it,
> though we've also been seeing 2231 headers from some versions of
> Thunderbird.  (One Thunderbird build even does 2231 headers with out-
> of-order continuations, which was a pain in the ass to handle.)

I went and implemented it now myself too. The specification wasn't too
clear as to how the merging was supposed to be done, but I guess with
the test case (worst I could think of):

key*2=ba%; key2*0=a; key3*0*=us-ascii'en'xyz;
 key*0="foo"; key2*1*=b%25; key3*1=plop%; key*1=baz

the results should be:

 key = foobazba%
 key2* = ''ab%25
 key3* = us-ascii'en'xyzplop%25

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