479133 - Add support for IMAP NOTIFY extension rfc rfc5465

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, enhancement)

Description

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RFC 5465 adds IMAP NOTIFY, which is a particularly worthy IMAP extension to support, I think, because it allows clients to selectively choose which events they want to listen for. One of the stated use cases is to be able to listen for new messages on multiple mailboxes at once.

I do not know the status of server implementations.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

It doesn't look like any servers support this yet, but I would definitely be interested in adding this to Thunderbird if there was a server to test against.

Comment 2

[casmls]

Archiveopteryx lists NOTIFY in its capabilities:
http://www.archiveopteryx.org/source/capability

Comment 3

[karlo]

The Dovecot IMAP server has just gotten an initial implementation of IMAP NOTIFY.
The feature will probably be included in the 2.2 release, but it is already available through Mercurial, see http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2012-February/064031.html for details.

Comment 4

[Pavel Volkovitskiy]

Dovecot 2.2.alpha1 supports NOTIFY
http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2012-October/000233.html

Comment 5

[Artur Zaprzała]

Dovecot 2.2.0 with IMAP NOTIFY support was finally released yesterday.

Comment 6

[Michael Kliewe]

I would also like to see this feature implemented, it would dramatically reduce the amount of IMAP connections on the server. Just having 1 connection instead of 20 is a big improvement, in terms of CPU, memory and amount of processes on the server.

Please implement it as soon as possible and be one of the first big mailclients that supports it!

Comment 7

[Jesus Cea]

What is the status of this?

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Nobody is currently working on it. Maybe you want to give it a shot?

Comment 9

[Jesus Cea]

Magnus Melin, too bad I don't know C++.

I am checking the sourcecode (this part is written in C++, could be written in javascript, no performance critical :-( ) and looks like the following would be really easy to implement:

1. If the server capability includes "NOTIFY", activate that extension.

2. In that case, DO NOT DO "STATUS" checks in TB. This is actually done when you manually mark folders as "check new email here too".

3. If you receive an unsolicited "STATUS" response from the server notifying of a mailbox change, ignore its data and just do a "STATUS" check ONLY for that mailbox. That is, schedule a "STATUS" check for that mailbox ASAP.

Sourcechange for this should be quite trivial for anybody familiar with this sourcecode. For me, trying to decipher C++ is hard enough, not feeling like trying to change it.

IMAP mailbox = thunderbird folder.

Comment 10

[Jesus Cea]

Just in case you are interested:

IMAP4 NOTIFY addon for Thunderbird!
http://blog.jcea.es/posts/20141011-thunderbird_notify.html

Comment 11

[Peter Gervai]

Dovecot supports this for about 10 years now and I am quite surprised it hasn't been implemented since.
IMAP NOTIFY would actually make it possible to support push for unlimited folders with no overhead.