[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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