[Dovecot] Pre-rev1 compatibility

[Dirk Essl]

Brian G. Peterson wrote:
> Hans Werner Strube wrote:
>> What about adding some compatibility for pre-rev1 IMAP4 clients which
>> are still around (e.g., CDE dtmail, even in Solaris 10)? Especially,
>> the understanding of command
>>   FETCH message (... RFC822.HEADER.LINES (parameters))
> 
> On Wednesday 06 December 2006 06:05, Dirk Essl wrote:
>> Yes, I would appreciate that, I still have some users running dtmail
>> and other 'old' mail clients, therefore I cannot migrate these users to
>> the new system, and they don't want to use any other client...
> 
> My general policy is that in some cases, the user is *not* right.  An IT 
> department cannot rationally be required to continue to support obsolete 
> applications when there are supported and modern alternatives.  Face it, 
> choice of email client for a small subset of your users is not a business 
> critical application that needs to be supported forever like it was some 
> absolutely essential piece of 1960's era COBOL code.
> 
> Perhaps it is time to either fix these obsolete mail clients yourself to 
> be compatible with current protocols, or stop supporting them, as their 
> development teams abandoned them long ago.  I don't believe obsolete 
> functionality (pre RFC or deprecated IMAP RFC's) belongs in dovecot imap.

Yes, I totally agree with you, but my company does the whole IT support 
for a quite big non-profit organization, so things are a little bit 
different here. Officially we don't support those clients but we are 
advised to give best effort support to unsupported clients (How stupid 
does this sound? ;-))

And I can really not understand how someone can use dtmail or exmh (Oh, 
I don't want to flame here) if we have nice applications like 
Thunderbird or Apple mail...

> Regards,
> 
>    - Brian
> 

kind regards
dirk