Subject: [Tools-discuss] IETF IMAP suggestions

From: "George, Wes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2016 18:27:49 +0000

Hi -

I've been trying to transition over to using IMAP for access to the IETF mailing lists that I'm subscribed to, and I have a couple of thoughts I wanted to share as a complete newbie when it comes to shared IMAP folders.

First, it may be worth breaking up the folders so that the current folder named after the mailing list only contains the last {12, 18, 24, whatever} months of list mail, and then an archive folder that is named [mailing-list]-archive or similar, where all messages older than the above age are moved, or a default that only provides the last 12 months of messages for IMAP sync or something. I find that even if one selects only a certain subset of the available folders to subscribe to, the act of asking your mail client to download even headers-only for some of the older mailing lists (some have existed for 20+ years) is bound to make it very unhappy for several days.
Case in point: I had to download 100K+ message headers for IETF@IETF, which took a good portion of the weekend. I then had to mass-select everything irrelevant from past years, delete them (and then mark them read so that the unread counter would be useful), and after several days, it's still less than 10% complete in updating the server on the status of all of those messages for my account, which is making it slow to download the message content for anything I actually want to read. Some of this may be a function of my mail client (Outlook 2011 mac, FWIW) being unable to bound the date scope for synchronizing messages i.e. a setting that tells it "Only sync last X months", and probably other limitations, but it's still a consideration in terms of the load on the server and ease of use for the end user.

Second, while a junk email box exists for those clients that expect one, it's doesn't appear to be writable or tied to my account, and thus I'm getting repeated and persistent Permission Denied errors when my client tries to move messages into the junk box. I'm not sure if there's a better solution to this (I have no option in my mail client to store junk locally, I tried) but thought I'd bring it up for your awareness.

Thanks,

Wes George

Anything below this line has been added by my company’s mail server, I have no control over it.
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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 10:38:53 -0700

On 5/23/2016 11:27 AM, George, Wes wrote:
> First, it may be worth breaking up the folders so that the current
> folder named after the mailing list only contains the last {12, 18, 24,
> whatever} months of list mail, and then an archive folder that is named
> [mailing-list]-archive or similar, where all messages older than the
> above age are moved, or a default that only provides the last 12 months
> of messages for IMAP sync or something.

I also had posted a note about this issue sometime back, but didn't post 
a suggested fix.

I think the above is nicely simple and sufficient.  It accommodates the 
problem of overly-large list folders for daily use, while still 
supplying the benefits of IMAP access to the older history of messages.

> Second, while a junk email box exists for those clients that expect one,
> it's doesn't appear to be writable or tied to my account, and thus I'm
> getting repeated and persistent Permission Denied errors when my client
> tries to move messages into the junk box. I'm not sure if there's a
> better solution to this

Turn off junk processing for your clients use of the IETF IMAP account.

But there's also a persistent error message due to no Inbox.  I know 
that folk know about this.  I'm unclear why it can't be solved by 
manually creating an empty inbox at the site.

d/
-- 

    Dave Crocker
    Brandenburg InternetWorking
    bbiw.net

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From: "George, Wes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 18:22:00 +0000

>Turn off junk processing for your clients use of the IETF IMAP account.

WG] that was my first thought as well, but it appears that not all mail
clients can toggle junk processing selectively/per account and it's either
on for all accounts or off for all of them. I concede that some amount of
this is "doc it hurts when I do this..." based on client limitations, so
it may be that there's no worthwhile fix here, but wanted to make sure
folk were aware.

Thanks
Wes

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 12:11:40 -0700

> it may be that there's no worthwhile fix here, but wanted to make sure

If an email client does not permit use of IMAP  in a mode that works 
well with enterprise archives -- that is, message stores that the client 
needs to treat as static and the responsibility of others -- there's 
really nothing that can be done.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker