Technical Summary
Many IMAP clients use the result of a SEARCH command as the input to
perform another operation, for example fetching the found messages,
deleting them or copying them to another mailbox.
This can be achieved using standard IMAP operations described in RFC
3501, however this would be suboptimal: the server will send the list
of found messages to the client, after that the client will have to
parse the list, reformat it and send it back to the server. The
client can't pipeline the SEARCH command with the subsequent command,
and, as a result, the server might not be able to perform some
optimizations.
This document proposes an IMAP extension that allows a client to tell
a server to use the result of a SEARCH (or UID SEARCH) command as an
input to any subsequent command.
Working Group Summary
This is an individual submission.
Protocol Quality
This was reviewed for the IESG by Chris Newman. There has been
some discussion about the details of when the server resets the
saved search list to the empty set. There are already 2 server
implementations of this document. At least one more client
and server vendor is interested in implementing the specification.
Spencer Dawkins was the GEN-ART reviewer.
Note to RFC Editor
Example 9, OLD:
S: H283 OK SEARCH completed
S: H282 OK SEARCH completed
NEW:
S: H282 OK SEARCH completed
S: H283 OK SEARCH completed
^^^^
Section 2.4, first paragraph, OLD:
are required to implement [ESEARCH] and to conform to additional
NEW:
MUST implement [ESEARCH] and conform to additional