--On Tuesday, July 15, 2003 04:30:24 AM -0400 "David H. Lynch Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| There is nothing special about contact/address book information. | There is no reason you can not store contacts, tasks, calendar items, | ... In any IMAP server you choose. All they are is specially formatted | messages. | | The Problem is that there are no IMAP clients that can properly | understand and treat those messages as contacts, tasks, ... |
If you consider IMAP as a MIME store rather than a message store (the later is of course a subset of the former) then one can consider storing any type of data in IMAP. Obviously one could store vCards and vCalendar objects in messages and have special mailboxes for those to represent address books and calendars. The problem is there is no 'standard' way to do this, and without a formal standard to describe where those items go and how they should be managed, there is no way to guarantee interoperability between clients, which is of course essential.
IMAP also presents certain hurdles. In particular, messages in IMAP are immutable - i.e. you cannot edit the content of a message once it is in the mail store. The only option for editing addresses or calendar events then, is to delete/expunge the old item and append a new item. That leads to the possibility of race-conditions when multiple clients are being used at the same time.
-- Cyrus Daboo
