Subject: [Extra] "IMAP $Important Keyword and \Important Special-Use Attribute"

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 10:27:28 +0800

A few years ago, Eric from Google and I worked up the subject
proposal.  We never finished it, and the draft got dropped.  I'm
proposing reviving it here; will folks please take a look and
comment?:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-extra-specialuse-important/

Google's server already implements this, and has since we originally
made the proposal, I believe.

The draft also creates the necessary IANA registry for special-use attributes.

Barry

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 10:37:31 +0800

And I already have an -01 version queued up that updates
"Applications" Area to "Applications and Real-Time", and that fixes
the "Changes..." section.  I'll not post it until there's more to
post.

Barry

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 10:27 AM, Barry Leiba <[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Extra mailing list
> [email-masked]
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From: Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 11:06:21 -0500

> the "Changes..." section.  I'll not post it until there's more to

My only concern here is that the distinction between $Important and \Flagged
is a bit confusing.  The draft tries to explain the difference, but I fear
that MUA authors will not read the text as thoroughly as they should and
conclude that "the user clicked on the 'star' because the user thinks it is
an important email - $Important it is!"... totally missing \Flagged.

FWIW, the \Flagged definition in RFC 6154 doesn't help this at all:

	This mailbox presents all messages marked in some way as
	"important".

This is an unfortunate wording.

Anyway, overall I like this and the only issues I spotted are in section
5.1.  There seem to be strange linebreaks:

	"Adviso\nry"
	"Appli\ncations"

Jeff.

-- 
Fact: 22.3% of all statistics are generated randomly.

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From: Neil Jenkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 10:29:15 +0800

On Thu, 16 Nov 2017, at 12:06 AM, Josef 'Jeff' Sipek wrote:
> My only concern here is that the distinction between $Important and
> \Flagged is a bit confusing.

I agree the naming is a bit annoying, but I think the difference can be
made clear:
 * \Flagged: the user explicitly marked this as important.
 * $Important: the server (using some unspecified algorithm) marked this
   as important.
(Of course, clients may be able to help train the server by allowing
users to toggle the $Important flag on messages the server
miscategorised, which does blur the distinction somewhat…)
> This is an unfortunate wording.

Ouch, agreed.

Overall though I'm in favour of this draft, and an IANA registry for special-
use names is definitely a step forward (we'll use it for JMAP too).
Neil.