CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Terry Gray/University of Washington Minutes of the Interactive Mail Access Protocol Working Group (IMAP) Agenda o Introductions o IMAP overview o Comments on the charter o Status of implementations o Status of protocol specification o Comments on Columbus BOF notes o Additional IMAP change requests o Seattle meeting References: /imap/imap* on ftp.cac.washington.edu Summary There were 20 people in attendance. For several, it was their first exposure to IMAP, so a few minutes was spent summarizing what IMAP is, how it compares/relates to other alternatives, and what the working group is chartered to do. The working group charter and notes from the Columbus BOF were reviewed and questions were answered. The status of the protocol specification and known IMAP implementations was reviewed. (An Internet-Draft is being composed that integrates and updates RFC 1176 and the imap2bis extensions.) Existing practice on the use of IMAP for news, archive, and document access (in addition to mail) was covered. Discussion on possible IMAP extensions followed. Finally, the next working group meeting (in Seattle, August 30-31) was announced. Discussion Points o Disconnected operation support, ala DMSP, continues to be widely desired. o There is considerable interest in using IMAP to access message archives. o Several people asked about extensions to support binary message part access, without Base64 or QP encoding: - Is it Possible? - What would be the Impact on s-expression model? - Can unencoded binary attachments be transferred without charset concerns? o The question of signaling when large blocks of data are being transferred was discussed: congestion of pipe; need to have multiple channels or out-of-band signals. o Can we have an IMAP server capabilities command, ala new SMTP? o Be sure to look at URL/I work before settling on unique message ID scheme. o Is IMAP a distribution list alternative: shared but limited access mailbox? o Can IMAP ``integrate'' two mailboxes (remote mail archive plus local subset)? o Should IMAP become ``Interactive Message Access Protocol''? Action Items Terry Gray needs to maintain (or cause to be maintained) an IMAP enhancement/request list, sorted into the following categories: o Protocol bug fixes o Upward compatible extensions - high priority - lower priority o Non-upward compatible changes - high priority - lower priority o Bad, or not clearly good, ideas A subset of that list must then be defined as the target for the immediate standardization effort, with other ideas being deferred for future consideration. Given the desire to preserve compatibility with the installed base, and move ahead promptly in getting a base IMAP standard defined, extensions will be necessarily limited to those deemed to have an extremely high priority. Mark Crispin needs to integrate RFC 1176 text with IMAP2BIS text and submit it as an Internet-Draft no later than August 15th. IMAP implementors/interested parties are encouraged to come to the next meeting in Seattle, August 30-31. Attendees Matti Aarnio mea@nic.nordu.net Chris Adie C.J.Adie@edinburgh.ac.uk James Allard jallard@microsoft.com Luc Boulianne lucb@cs.mcgill.ca J. Nevil Brownlee nevil@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz Al Costanzo al@akc.com Maria Dimou-Zacharova dimou@dxcern.cern.ch Christoph Graf graf@switch.ch Terry Gray gray@cac.washington.edu Jari Hamalainen jah@rctre.nokia.com Xander Jansen xander.jansen@surfnet.nl Scott Kaplan scott@wco.ftp.com Jim Knowles jknowles@binky.arc.nasa.gov Keith Moore moore@cs.utk.edu Mel Pleasant pleasant@hardees.rutgers.edu Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil Kenneth Rossen kenr@shl.com David Sitman a79vm.tau.ac.il Peter Svanberg psv@nada.kth.se Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@cnri.reston.va.us