Technical Summary
This spec extends IMAP with an additional fetch item (PREVIEW)
which allows clients to obtain a short piece of text to use as
a preview line in mailbox listings.
Working Group Summary
This document and fetch item was originally named "snippet", however
JMAP uses "preview" for the equivalent field, and "snippet" for a
marked up section of the message containing search terms, so the
working group agreed to change the naming to be consistent.
There was also debate over the maximum length, with both JMAP and
EXTRA working groups settling on 256 characters maximum.
Finally there were questions over whether "LAZY" was useful, but nobody
saw any downside to including it. Servers can choose to always calculate
the preview even if LAZY is given.
There was a significant amount of rework through multiple meetings which
led to a very complex document. In the end, the authors asked to drop
the complexity and go back to an earlier version, which achieved working
group consensus.
Document Quality
This spec is quite easy to implement - it has multiple examples for all
the likely cases. It's been implemented in Dovecot and Cyrus IMAPd.
Personnel
Document Shepherd - Bron Gondwana (EXTRA co-chair)
Responsible Area Director - Barry Leiba
RFC Editor Note
Please make the following change to the second paragraph in Section 1:
OLD
Generation of a preview on the server has several benefits. First,
it allows consistent representation of previews across all clients.
This standardized display can reduce user confusion when using
multiple clients, as abbreviated message representations in clients
will show identical message contents.
NEW
Generation of a preview on the server has several benefits. First,
it allows consistent representation of previews across all clients.
While different clients might generate quite different preview text,
having common preview text generated by the server can give a more
consistent user experience to those who use multiple clients.