Date: Sat, 9 Jul 1994 12:11:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU>
Subject: Re: sequence numbers ( was: (long) sketch of proposed imap: URL syntax ... )
To: "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199407091851.AA23653@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU>
Message-Id: <MailManager.773781105.18656.mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
I object vehemently to the notion of deprecating sequence numbers.
Sequence numbers serve a useful purpose. They will always be faster than
UIDs, and are perfectly satisfactory as long as you only use them within a
single online session. Sequence numbers are the only reasonable way to
specify concepts such as ``the sixth message'', ``the last 50 messages'',
``the first 20 messages'', etc.
It is quite likely that my implementation will map between UIDs and sequence
numbers, so that as much as possible it can use sequence numbers during the
session.
I never advocated presenting sequence numbers to the user. None of the GUI
clients I have written do so (in spite of considerable pressure).