Technical Summary
The IMAP4 specification allows the searching of only 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 round trips delay, and not requiring
disruption of the currently selected mailbox. This extension also
uses MAILBOX and TAG fields in ESEARCH responses, allowing a client
to pipeline the searches if it chooses. This document updates RFC
4466 and obsoletes RFC 6237.
Working Group Summary
The document was reviewed on the imapext mailing list by several
participants. This is also where the original work on RFC 6237 was
done. There was some discussion within the interested community on
that list (around a half dozen regular contributors) about whether
there was ample implementation experience to justify moving it to the
Standards Track, and after some concerns were addressed in that
regard, consensus was reached to proceed.
There is another mechanism referred to as “\all” that a few
believe to be the more widely deployed solution, but it has not been
documented and there don’t appear to be any plans to do so.
There is an imapext thread where this discussion took place,
including anecdotes of implementation as well as some from people who
chose not to implement and their reasons. The thread begins here:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/imapext/current/msg05151.html
The OpsDir review resulted in the addition of section 2.4.
Document Quality
This document moves the contained extension from Experimental status
(originally RFC 6237) to the standards track after some
implementation experience has shown it to be useful and stable. An
Implementation Status section appears in the draft.
Personnel
Murray Kucherawy is the document shepherd.
Pete Resnick is the responsible Area Director.