dovecot - Nov 2013 - Question about dovecot 2.2 and LIST command

I am running dovecot 2.2 changeset 16983:d925674c4329 on AIX. We use mbox 
files with the "/" delimter. I have an imap protocol question. When I
do:

1 list directory1/ *
1 OK List completed.

Is that the correct answer?

If I do
1 list "" *

it shows
* LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "/" "directory1"

I forget why I think that even with the delimiter, I should see some 
information about it. Is this a silly test that no imap client does?

Thanks,
Jonathan

Quoting Jonathan Siegle <jsiegle at psu.edu>:
> I am running dovecot 2.2 changeset 16983:d925674c4329 on AIX. We use  
> mbox files with the "/" delimter. I have an imap protocol
question.
> When I do:
>
> 1 list directory1/ *
> 1 OK List completed.
>
> Is that the correct answer?
Yes.  See below.
> If I do
> 1 list "" *
>
> it shows
> * LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "/" "directory1"
You are asking for the list of all mailboxes under (i.e. within) the  
'directory1' mailbox.  According to your 2nd command, there are no  
visible mailboxes under "directory1".

\HasChildren shouldn't normally be returned in this case.  But that's  
a SHOULD NOT - not a MUST NOT.  From RFC 3348:

    In many cases, however, a server may not be able to efficiently
    compute whether a user has access to all child mailboxes, or multiple
    users may be accessing the same account and simultaneously changing
    the mailbox hierarchy.  As such a client MUST be prepared to accept
    the \HasChildren attribute as a hint.  That is, a mailbox MAY be
    flagged with the \HasChildren attribute, but no child mailboxes will
    appear in a subsequent LIST response.

michael

On 19.11.2013, at 0.50, Jonathan Siegle <jsiegle at psu.edu> wrote:
> I am running dovecot 2.2 changeset 16983:d925674c4329 on AIX. We use mbox
files with the "/" delimter. I have an imap protocol question. When I
do:
> 
> 1 list directory1/ *
> 1 OK List completed.
> 
> Is that the correct answer?
> 
> If I do
> 1 list "" *
> 
> it shows
> * LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "/" "directory1"
> 
> I forget why I think that even with the delimiter, I should see some
information about it. Is this a silly test that no imap client does?
Well, something like this apparently was used by Pine (and Alpine?) with mbox
format, so this is quite a special case. Looks like it got broken by commit
http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.1/rev/8cdc7c13d6f2

I?m not sure if it?s really worth spending time on though..