Thunderbird:IMAP RFC 4551 Implementation

From MozillaWiki
Revision as of 19:32, 3 June 2008 by Bienvenu (talk | contribs) (IMAP RFC 4551 Implementation Plan/Description)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

See RFC 4551 and bug 436151 for more details

This page describes my plan for implementing this RFC in the mailnews code.

Overview

This extension to the IMAP protocol is primarily intended for use by mobile devices but it will help Thunderbird users as well. It reduces the amount of data the client needs to sync every time a folder is selected. The server keeps track of modification sequence numbers for every change made to a folder. When a folder is selected, the server returns the highest modification sequence number for that folder. The client can then just do an incremental sync, based on the highest modification sequence number it is aware of. If those two numbers are the same, the client doesn't need to do any synchronization at all.

User Experience

This should all be transparent to the user. If their IMAP server supports this extension, selecting large folders should be quite a bit faster, especially over lower bandwidth connections.

We may need to provide a way for the user to turn off this feature, in case their server implementation has bugs in it. My fervent hope is that if this comes to pass, we can get by with a hidden pref.

How Syncing Works Today

Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Thunderbird:IMAP_RFC_4551_Implementation&oldid=95302"