Message Organization (morg) Internet Drafts

      
 IMAP4 Multimailbox SEARCH Extension
 
 draft-ietf-morg-multimailbox-search-07.txt
 Date: 07/03/2011
 Authors: Barry Leiba, Alexey Melnikov
 Working Group: Message Organization (morg)
 Formats: txt xml
The IMAP4 specification allows the searching only of the selected mailbox. A user often wants to search multiple mailboxes, and a client that wishes to support this must issue a series of SELECT and SEARCH commands, waiting for each to complete before moving on to the next. This extension allows a client to search multiple mailboxes with one command, limiting the round-trips and waiting for various searches to complete, and not requiring disruption of the currently selected mailbox. This also uses MAILBOX and TAG fields in ESEARCH responses, allowing a client to pipeline the searches if it chooses.

Message Organization (morg)

Last Modified: 2009-04-03

Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/morg

Chair(s):

  • Randall Gellens <rg+ietf@qualcomm.com>

  • Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi>

    Applications Area Director(s):

  • Lisa Dusseault <lisa.dusseault@gmail.com>
  • Alexey Melnikov <alexey.melnikov@isode.com>

    Applications Area Advisor:

  • Alexey Melnikov <alexey.melnikov@isode.com>

    Mailing Lists:

    General Discussion: morg@ietf.org
    To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/morg
    Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/morg/current/maillist.html

    Description of Working Group:

    The IETF Message Organization extensions Working Group will work on IMAP
    extensions that improve clients' ability to find messages or groups of
    messages in an IMAP mailstore. As a secondary goal, the WG will design
    its extensions so as to minimize client/server round trips and bandwidth
    overhead.

    In particular the Working Group is chartered to finalize and publish the
    following IMAP extensions as proposed standards:

    (a) A SORT extension specifying new sort criteria for header fields
    containing email addresses. This extension will be based on
    draft-karp-morg-sortdisplay-00.txt.

    (b) A SEARCH extension specifying new search criteria for header fields
    containing email addresses.

    (c) A LIST extension for returning STATUS information in LIST responses.
    This extension will be based on
    draft-melnikov-imapext-status-in-list-00.txt.

    (d) An extension that formalizes a way to return message counters by
    message context using STATUS and SEARCH commands.

    (e) An extension that specifies Internet-search-engine-like searching.
    Such searches would be more flexible (and less formally defined) than
    substring-based searches, and may return their results in a significant
    order. They may include "relevance" scores or similar information that
    could be useful to the user.

    (f) New collation algorithms such as "ignore whitespace" and "numeric,
    ignoring punctuation". The WG group will determine which collations are
    needed, taking into consideration the needs of the protocols that use
    the collation framework.

    (g) An extension that allows searching for messages within a message
    thread. This extension will be based on
    draft-gulbrandsen-imap-inthread-03.txt.

    (h) An extension that allows searching of multiple mailboxes at the same
    time (based on draft-melnikov-imapext-multimailbox-search-03.txt), or of
    multiple mailbox views. The WG will determine which approach (mailboxes
    or views) is more suitable as part of its work.

    Additional documents may be added this list, but only via a charter
    revision. There must also be demonstrable willingness in the IMAP
    development community to actually implement a given extension before it
    can be added to this charter.

    Revising or replacing the base IMAP4rev1 specification (RFC 3501) is out
    of the scope of this WG. This WG will ensure that all extensions it
    proposes take into account any existing problems in the base
    specification of IMAP, and do not make them worse nor make the problems
    harder to address in the future.

    Goals and Milestones:

    Internet-Drafts:

    IMAP4 Multimailbox SEARCH Extension (14642 bytes)
    The IMAP SEARCH=INTHREAD and THREAD=REFS Extensions (12466 bytes)
    Display-based Address Sorting for the IMAP4 SORT Extension (7932 bytes)
    The IMAP SEARCH=ADDRESS Extension (11221 bytes)
    IMAP4 Extension for returning STATUS information in extended LIST (10313 bytes)
    Additional collation algorithms for use in IMAP and Sieve (10425 bytes)
    IMAP4 Extension for Fuzzy Search (9824 bytes)

    No Request For Comments

    IETF Secretariat - Please send questions, comments, and/or suggestions to ietf-web@ietf.org.

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