63038 - can't create folders with '/' in the name on servers where hierarchy delimiter is not '/'

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[David :Bienvenu]

When creating folders on servers whose hiearchy delimiter is not '/', we need to
escape '/' (and '^') before passing the server name to the url.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

accept

Comment 2

[R.K.Aa.]

related/dup of bug 29926?

Comment 3

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

bienvenu, still working on this ~8 year old bug?

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

No, but I wonder if it's still a bug...

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

wanted‑thunderbird3- at least until someone has confirmed this is still an issue

Comment 6

[hansen]

Attachment: Screenshot in latest trunk

I don't understand the bug, so I supply an image :)

Running latest trunk WinXP with Courier-IMAP as server on FreeBSD.

Created the folder "test", then created a subfolder in that called "this/is/a/test".

Is it the correct behavior or should it have created "this/is/a/test"?

Comment 7

[gene smith]

I only have one test account that uses . as delimiter: a courier imap server. And I don't see a way to in have a / in the folder name.

So this is still a bug.

Comment 8

[gene smith]

Not completely sure this is 100% a tb problem. If I telnet to the server and create the folder I see this:

. create "INBOX.AAA.gene/smith"
. NO Invalid mailbox name

Note: INBOX.AAA existed before attempting the imap command.
With tb, when I create the folder name gene/smith using the dialog, I see this:

. create "INBOX.AAA.gene.smith"
. OK

So tb changes the / to . and the two levels are created rather than a single folder named gene/smith (or gene.smith).

Using telnet and the tb dialog, I tried escaping the / various ways and quoting the "gene/smith" and it didn't help. Maybe a base64 string of some sort is needed?

Comment 9

[gene smith]

...Or maybe the slash in a folder (mailbox) name is not possible since the folder name would be used in at least 2 filenames in the ImapMail directory (e.g., gene/smith.msf and also gene/smith if offline sync) and a slash can't be part of a filename. But I'm no expert on char encoding (I barely understand ascii :-)).

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Perhaps Alfred or Nikolay can shed light

Comment 11

[gene smith]

Observation: On 3 servers that use / (not .) as hierarchy delimiter, when creating subfolder gene.smith :

Openwave creates single folder, gene.smith
Gmail creates single folder, gene.smith
IdeaImapServer creates folder and subfolder, gene/smith

Looking closely at IMAP spec RFC 3501, I see nothing that explicitly forbids / in a mailbox (folder) name when the delimiter is not /.
Mailbox naming: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-5.1
Some discussion of / and \: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-5.1.3

Comment 12

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

(In reply to gene smith from comment #11)

Looking closely at IMAP spec RFC 3501, I see nothing that explicitly forbids / in a mailbox (folder) name when the delimiter is not /.

I agree.
Using '/' or even '' is problematic if the IMAP hierarchies are mapped as folders in the file system. So just as the TB does in his profile. And I suspect many servers handle it the same way.

If a server returns a mailbox name with a '/', we would need to escape it in some way. I am afraid that we have not yet implemented such a mechanism.

Comment 13

[Nikolay Shopik]

I don't have any input on that