Technical Summary
This set of documents meets the "Forward without Download" milestone of the
Lemonade
working group charter. The CATENATE extension to the Internet Message Access
Protocol (IMAP)
extends the APPEND command to allow clients to create messages on the
IMAP server which may contain a combination of new data along with
parts of (or entire) messages already on the server. Using this
extension, the client can catenate parts of an already existing
message on to a new message without having to first download the data
and then upload it back to the server. The URLAUTH extension to IMAP
provides a means by which an IMAP client can use URIs carrying authorization
to access limited message data on the IMAP server. These URIs, like a pawn
ticket, can be redeemed by whoever presents them and carry no authentication
information. The BURL specification extends the submission
profile of SMTP by adding a new BURL command which can be used to fetch
submission data from an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)
server. It is presumed that BURL will generally be used with IMAP URLAUTH
style URIs. This permits a mail client to inject content from an IMAP
server into the SMTP infrastructure without downloading it to the client and
uploading
it back to the server.
Working Group Summary
Considerable debate and contributions in the last year lead to a WG decision to
standardize this pull based mechanism instead of a push or a proxy based
mechanism. There is now at least rough consensus in the working group on this
approach. These documents have received considerable review in the WG. Note
that the detailed description of how the two IMAP extensions and the SMTP
Submitextension work together will be published in the
draft-ietf-lemonade-profile-03.txt, which will be sent for WG last call in
another month or so.
Protocol Quality
This document was reviewed for the IESG by Ted Hardie. The PROTO shepherd for
this document is
Glenn Parsons
Note to RFC Editor
In draft-ietf-lemonade-catenate, please update the text as below
OLD:
resp-text-code =/ toobig_response_code / badurl_response_code
toobig_response_code = "TOOBIG"
badurl_response_code = "BADURL" SP url-resp-text
NEW:
resp-text-code =/ toobig-response-code / badurl-response-code
toobig-response-code = "TOOBIG"
badurl-response-code = "BADURL" SP url-resp-text