Technical Summary
The ANNOTATE extension to the Internet Message Access Protocol
permits clients and servers to maintain "meta data" for messages, or
individual message parts, stored in a mailbox on the server. For
example, this can be used to attach comments and other useful
information to a message. It is also possible to attach annotations
to specific parts of a message, so that, for example, they could be
marked as seen or important, or a comment added.
Working Group Summary
The IMAPEXT WG did a lot of good and careful work on this document.
Very responsibly, the WG considered at the end whether this was actually
going to be implemented. Although several client developers indicated a
strong need for annotation functionality, few server developers were
willing to commit to implementation (and deployment might be even worse).
Thus, the WG reluctantly concluded to publish this as Experimental, hoping
that some implementation experience will lead to a better understanding of
what it takes to convince server implementors to do this functionality,
along with what it takes to implement it robustly and in a decently
performant fashion.
Protocol Quality
The IMAPEXT WG did as much work for this document as would be expected
for a Proposed Standard, including Last Calls and several individual
reviews.
Lisa Dusseault reviewed this document for the IESG.
Note to RFC Editor
Please add the following paragraph to the abstract.
NEW:
"Note that this document was the product of a WG which had good
consensus on how to approach the problem. Nevertheless, the WG felt it
did not have enough information on implementation and deployment hurdles
to meet all the requirements of a Proposed Standard. The IETF solicits
implementations and implementation reports in order to make further
progress."
Please add the following sub-section to section 7.
NEW: 7.4 Capability registration
This document registers "ANNOTATE-EXPERIMENT-1" as an IMAPEXT
capability in http://www.iana.org/assignments/imap4-capabilities.