Technical Summary
The METADATA extension to the Internet Message Access Protocol
permits clients and servers to maintain "annotations" or "meta data"
on IMAP servers. It is possible to have annotations on a per-mailbox
basis or on the server as a whole. For example, this would allow
comments about the purpose of a particular mailbox to be "attached"
to that mailbox, or a "message of the day" containing server status
information to be made available to anyone logging in to the server.
Working Group Summary
This document is an individual submission.
It was informally last called in the IMAPEXT WG and was discussed
in several WG meetings. It was also reviewed by lemonade WG
participants for interaction with other IMAP extensions.
Protocol Quality
This was reviewed for the IESG by Chris Newman. This proposal has
been discussed extensively and is leveraged by upcoming extensions
from the lemonade WG. There was a proposal to add multi-valued
attributes, but it was not accepted due to existence of a
work-around using subordinate entries. This area might need
further feedback from client implementors. There have been
ongoing requests for this functionality for many years, but also
ongoing concerns about the level of complexity in this proposal.
There are already 2 server implementations of earlier versions of
this document. At least one client and one server vendor are
interested in implementing the specification. Francis Dupont
performed GEN-ART review.
After the first last call for this document, an effort was made
to greatly simplify this proposal resulting in a second last
call.