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Hi all,

I'm building a new open source IMAP server (
https://github.com/wildduck-email/wildduck) and was wondering about the
\Recent flag. Is it even needed today? I would like to keep my server as
standards compliant as possible but the ephemeral nature of \Recent makes
it a bit difficult to sync between sessions in multiple hosts. It would be
doable but the complexity needed does not make it seem worth it.

Is there even any major client using this flag in a sane way? I don't think
I have even ever encountered it outside the RFCs.

Best regards,
Andris Reinman
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Hi,

I've never seen it in real use either.

But it's simplish to implement along with MSNs. You keep a UID 
persistently, "the last UID for which some session has seen \recent". In 
the code where you assign MSNs for each session, you look at whether each 
message has UID>that, and if so, you set \recent in that session only and 
increase the threshold.

Simple to do, but worthless. Your call ;)

Arnt

I agree, and we aren?t using it in iOS/macOS Mail.  We?ve thought about it several times, though? but every time, the semantics proved to not be reliable enough.

On Mar 10, 2017, at 1:42 PM, Andris Reinman <andris.reinman@gmail.com<mailto:andris.reinman@gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi all,

I'm building a new open source IMAP server (https://github.com/wildduck-email/wildduck) and was wondering about the \Recent flag. Is it even needed today? I would like to keep my server as standards compliant as possible but the ephemeral nature of \Recent makes it a bit difficult to sync between sessions in multiple hosts. It would be doable but the complexity needed does not make it seem worth it.

Is there even any major client using this flag in a sane way? I don't think I have even ever encountered it outside the RFCs.

Best regards,
Andris Reinman
_______________________________________________
Imap-protocol mailing list
Imap-protocol@u.washington.edu<mailto:Imap-protocol@u.washington.edu>
http://mailman13.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-protocol

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Simultaneous access does make it more complicated, you have to maintain a
lock across or at least issue a locked RMW to wherever you're storing that
value.

Never seemed all that worth it to me, especially trying to sync with
non-IMAP access in our case.

Brandon

On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 12:50 AM, Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt@gulbrandsen.priv.no
> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've never seen it in real use either.
>
> But it's simplish to implement along with MSNs. You keep a UID
> persistently, "the last UID for which some session has seen \recent". In
> the code where you assign MSNs for each session, you look at whether each
> message has UID>that, and if so, you set \recent in that session only and
> increase the threshold.
>
> Simple to do, but worthless. Your call ;)
>
> Arnt
> _______________________________________________
> Imap-protocol mailing list
> Imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
> http://mailman13.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-protocol
>
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Awesome, thanks for the feedback! If \Recent in practice only matters for
the Dovecot ImapTest then I won't waste any time with it. The server I'm
building is a distributed one (run many instances, connect to any of these
(mailbox updates between server instances are propagated using a journal))
and ensuring \Recent to be seen by just a single session would mean some
kind of extra locking and extra overhead for no gains whatsoever.

Best regards,
Andris Reinman
http://wildduck.email/


On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 5:49 PM, Neil Jhaveri <njhaveri@apple.com> wrote:

> I agree, and we aren?t using it in iOS/macOS Mail.  We?ve thought about it
> several times, though? but every time, the semantics proved to not be
> reliable enough.
>
> On Mar 10, 2017, at 1:42 PM, Andris Reinman <andris.reinman@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm building a new open source IMAP server (https://github.com/wildduck-
> email/wildduck) and was wondering about the \Recent flag. Is it even
> needed today? I would like to keep my server as standards compliant as
> possible but the ephemeral nature of \Recent makes it a bit difficult to
> sync between sessions in multiple hosts. It would be doable but the
> complexity needed does not make it seem worth it.
>
> Is there even any major client using this flag in a sane way? I don't
> think I have even ever encountered it outside the RFCs.
>
> Best regards,
> Andris Reinman
> _______________________________________________
> Imap-protocol mailing list
> Imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
> http://mailman13.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-protocol
>
>
>
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