# URL for imap: protocol

Steven D. Majewski (sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu)
Fri, 17 Jun 1994 19:01:55 -0400

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    Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 19:01:55 -0400

    From: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu>

    Message-Id: <199406172301.AA21958@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: URL for imap: protocol

I have asked this on the imap mailing list and thought I should
also ask here. ( Please reply directly to me, or at least CC me:
I have only just send a subscribe message to uri-request moments
before sending this message. )

(1) Have there been any proposals for a URL for the imap protocol ?

(2) I don't quite understand URL's for mid: and cid:
[ see last paragraph of last included message. ]
Shouldn't they be subordinate to a URL that specifies a protocol
( like news: (nntp) or imap:, for example ) so that they can be
actually located and accessed ? But I *don't* get the impression
from the draft spec. that URL's can be chained in a hierarchical
relationship ( news://.../mid:.../cid:... ? ). If they CAN'T,
then don't they really belong as part of a URN rather than a URL?

- Steve Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics

[ included: two messages I send to imap mailing list. ]

--- Forwarded mail from "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>

Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 12:05:29 -0400
From: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>
Message-Id: <199406171605.AA18172@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>
To: imap@cac.washington.edu
Subject: imap URL's

Has an imap URL specification been defined yet ?

If not, I would assume ( trying to follow the format of
other URL's ) something like:

imap://[userid@]host.name/mbox[other]

where optional other can be something like:

?query-string (i.e. a selection that returns a subset of mbox)
/message ( message sequence-number or message-id??? )
/message#fragment

- Steve Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics

--- End of forwarded message from "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>

--- Forwarded mail from "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>

Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 18:31:20 -0400
From: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>
Message-Id: <199406172231.AA21104@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>
To: John Gardiner Myers <jgm+@cmu.edu>, imap@cac.washington.edu
Subject: Re: imap URL's

On Jun 17, 13:46, John Gardiner Myers wrote:
>
> "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu> writes:
> > imap://[userid@]host.name/mbox[other]
>
> The format I suggested way back had "other" required to be a UID.
>

imap://userid@host.name

would be more consistant with the common practice of:

ftp://userid@host.name

And in fact, draft-ietf-uri-url-03.{ps,txt}
<URL: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/url-spec.txt>
says that an optional user name is a part of the internet protocol
part:

| Internet protocol parts
|
| Those schemes which refer to internet protocols mostly have a
| common syntax for the rest of the object name. This starts with a
| double slash "//" to indicate its presence, and continues until the
| following slash "/". Within that section are
|
| An optional user name,
| if required (as it is with a few FTP
| servers). The password, is present, follows
| the user name, separated from it by a colon;
| the user name and optional password are
| followed by a commercial at sign "@". The
| user of user name and passwords which are
| public is discouraged.
|
|
| The internet domain name
| of the host in RFC1037 format (or,
| optionally and less advisably, the IP address
| as a set of four decimal digits)
|

The above seems to suggest that the ftp: format is "the common format"
which any other protocol URL should follow.

>
> Mailbox names can have slashes and/or question marks, so you have to
> be careful about ambiguity problems.
>

And I think it's pretty clear that "?" is reserved in the URL syntax
for indicating search strings, so IF a mailbox does in fact have a
"?" char, it will have to be escaped.

    ---

    Slashes to delimit "other", though, may be a problem.
    ( i.e. I didn't expect any disagreement on the other parts, above.
      It was the syntax and semantics for the trailing other that I
      wasn't sure about. :-)

    I initially thought it should be:
    	imap://userid@hostname/mbox#message-id

    But I think that reserving "#" to point to a point IN a message
    ( perhaps different sections of a MIME message ) is more in the
    spirit of current URL usage.

    Using only slashes as delimiters for both mailboxes and message
    selectors may be ambiguous to a human reader, but not necessarily
    to server software: When the first part of a url path resolves to
    a mailbox name, the the rest MUST be a selector. ( But I wouldn't
    be unhappy to hear a good argument for a better choice of delimiter)

    The other "common practice" that would remove ambiguity, is that
    a trailing "/" is usually mapped to an index of some sort.
    ( http: maps to the default index file, ftp: maps it to a directory
    listing, rather than a file. ), so "mbox/" SHOULD mean an index
    of the mailbox contents, and "mbox/anything" should be a selection
    IN than mailbox. "mbox" can itself contain slashes without ambiguity.

    What I am confused about is that there is a URL type reserved for
    mid: (message-id) and cid: ( MIME content id ), but no indication
    how these could be subsidiary to news: ( or in this case, a
    proposed imap: url. )

    - Steve Majewski       (804-982-0831)      <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
    - UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics

    [ I don't know where to CC this for URL discussion, but if I find
      out, I'll repost it there too. ]

    --- End of forwarded message from "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>

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