[imp] Display of folders from Cyrus IMAPD

[Andrew Morgan]

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:

> 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.

All of this sounds reasonable to me.  :)

 	Andy