dovecot - Jan 2006 - IMAP subscriptions - how, for what and why?

Again, not a Dovecot issua - but can someone clarify better what IMAP
subscriptions (SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE/LSUB) are and what they are used
for?

I've seen a few times in Microsoft mail clients, the options to
subscribe to folders and to "show only subscribed folders".  I
haven't
played much with them, though.  But what's the actual point?  Except
for being returned in the list of LSUB, what else changes when doing a
SUBSCRIBE to a mailbox?

Are subscriptions supposed to be remembered by the server outside of
the context of a session (so a client that connects to the server at
some point and authenticates will already see in LSUB what a possibly
other client has subscribed to in a previous session)?

  Clarifications appreciated, regards,
  -- Tom

-- 
  Tom Alsberg - hacker (being the best description fitting this space)
  Web page:	http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/
DISCLAIMER:  The above message does not even necessarily represent what
my fingers have typed on the keyboard, save anything further.

On Tue, 2006-01-10 at 13:03 +0200, Tom Alsberg wrote:
> Again, not a Dovecot issua - but can someone clarify better what IMAP
> subscriptions (SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE/LSUB) are and what they are used
> for?
Pretty much the only point of subscriptions is that you don't have to
look at all the mailboxes that server has to offer. This is especially
useful if you have tens or hundreds of shared/public mailboxes (eg.
mailing lists or some news gateway or whatever).

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Tom Alsberg wrote:
> Again, not a Dovecot issua - but can someone clarify better what IMAP
> subscriptions (SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE/LSUB) are and what they are used
> for?
>
> I've seen a few times in Microsoft mail clients, the options to
> subscribe to folders and to "show only subscribed folders".  I
haven't
> played much with them, though.  But what's the actual point?  Except
The "reference IMAP" server UW-imap (http://www.courier-mta.org/fud/
;)
will by default serve an user's home directory awhole. So you have three 
options to NOT browse all your files on the server:

1) use a dedicated mail server, where only your mails are storred.
-> No use of "subscribe".

2) Use a "mail directory prefix" configured in each mail client, which
is
transparently added/removed during the client/server communication.
Then you see files (aka mailboxes) in this hierarchie only, but any of 
them.
-> No use of "subscribe".

3) If you enable "show only subscribed folders", then the subscription
list is retrieved by the client and only these folders are displayed. If 
you like to view other folders as well, you have to subscribe to them. 
Actually, you can access any file (mailbox), but they are simply not 
shown,

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser