[imp] Display of folders from Cyrus IMAPD
Aleksandar Milivojevic
alex at milivojevic.org
Fri Apr 21 13:44:15 PDT 2006
Quoting Andrew Morgan <morgan at orst.edu>:
> For example, let's say I had the following folders:
>
> INBOX
> INBOX.foo
> Other Users.bob
> Shared Folders.helpdesk
>
> How would IMP display this?
If not using altnamespace, you'd get:
INBOX
foo
helpdesk
user
bob
Which is non-intuitive for end user. "user" and "helpdesk" are not
his peronal folders. There's also a problem if user had INBOX.user
and INBOX.helpdesk folders. Than display is going to be:
INBOX
foo
helpdesk
user
user
bob
To have display like above presented to end user is totally wrong in
my opinion.
Not sure what you'd get if using altnamespace on Cyrus server. If
folder names are mungled only for personal namespace (which I beleive
is the case), you'd probably get:
INBOX
foo
Other Users
bob
Shared Folders
helpdesk
This might look better. However, if user had "INBOX.Other Users" or
"INBOX.Shared Folders" (the later is more likely to happen in real
world), you'd get screwed up display again:
INBOX
foo
Other Users
Other Users
bob
Shared Folders
Shared Folders
helpdesk
IMO, just putting shared folders into some "virtual container" isn't
going to work either. As soon user has folder with the same name, you
are in trouble again (same problems as when altnamespace is enabled in
Cyrus config). If developers are insisting on using namespace info to
alter how folder names are displayed (and seems they have some good
arguments for going that route), the only possible solution is to have
some kind of delimiter for folders belonging to different namespaces
(instead of putting all of them in the same bag). For example,
assuming output of NAMESPACE command is NAMESPACE (("INBOX." "."))
(("user." ".")) (("" "."))
INBOX
bob
foo
helpdesk
-----
user
bob
-----
helpdesk
Which would probably translate to something like this for those using
altnamespace:
INBOX
bob
foo
helpdesk
-----
Other Users
bob
-----
Shared Folders
helpdesk
Or it could be marked some other way (say different font or colour for
INBOX and user). The above examples have names mungled for all
namespaces, which wuold work if there was some sort of visual separator.
The problem with above is that it might look ugly. Cyrus with
altnamsepace turned on looks nice. With altnamespace turned off not
so nice. Some other IMAP servers might look quite ugly. And display
is obviously different depending on IMAP server used (or even options
within same IMAP server), which is clearly something developers were
trying to avoid in the first place when implementing this namespace
thingie.
--
See Ya' later, alligator!
http://www.8-P.ca/
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