Subject: Folder name space, imap, and javamail

From: George Lindholm <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 16:27:15 -0700

Hi,
   we have a large pine user base and recently we've introduced a imap javamail based webclient
to them.

One of the problems that have cropped up is that there are some folders out there that can't
be opened with javamail because when we do a folder list, the names we get back are not the
one that are actually on the imap server.

Eg.
   The user created folders with pine called (eg):

Amazon &- Chapters
IBM & Sony

A Folder.list() returns

Amazon & Chapters
IBM

and of course trying to open folder "Amazon & Chapters" fails miserably.

A quick read of rfc3501 makes it sound like the server should
be sending out the folder list in such a way that javamail would
see the real names after passing the string through the BASE64 decoder.
Or am I missing something? Is there another solution for this?

Thanks

JavaMail 1.3, UW imap 2002.330

    George
-- 
[email-masked]       ITServices, UBC
Programmer/Analyst

phone:    604.822.4375       fax:      604.822.5116

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From: Jacob Morzinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 17:51:18 -0400

>   The user created folders with pine called (eg):
[...]
> Amazon & Chapters
[...]
> and of course trying to open folder "Amazon & Chapters" fails miserably.

Many young imap clients don't properly handle non-ascii folder names,
nor the ampersand character which is the special character used to start
encoding a non-ascii name.  I've seen this problem myself, with other
newly-written webmail systems.  Pine and Mozilla's imap client each
handle folder names correctly -- you can use them as reference clients,
to see what ought to happen for particular folder names.

RFC 3501, section 5.1.3 lists the modified UTF-7 encoding scheme that
the javamail client ought to understand, and apparently does not
understand.  If you bring up the point with the developers, perhaps they
can fix the bug in javamail's handling of encoded folder names.

-- 
 Jacob Morzinski                                [email-masked]