first.last mailboxes ...

[Ken Murchison]

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> have a client telling me that '.' is perfectly valid in a mailbox, cause
> he can do it @earthlink.net ... I know with Cyrus IMAPd you can't, since
> the '.' denotes a subfolder, but can someone point me to an RFC or
> *something* that states that it is, in fact, not valid?
> 
> I know how to do it with setting up a 'regular mailbox' and then just
> aliasing the first.last to that mailbox, but I know explaining that to him
> is going to raise counter-arguments, but if I can be on the 'technical
> high-ground' before that stage, it would be soooo much smoother ...

Its probably in the text of RFC 3501 or RFC 2342, but its pretty obvious 
that whatever character the server uses as the hierarchy separator 
(advertised either via NAMESPACE or LIST "" ""), will be treated as such 
in a mailbox name.  If a server decided to use 'a' as the separator 
character, then the same would apply.  FWIW, you can tell Cyrus to use 
'/' as the separator by enabling the unixhierarchysep option in imapd.conf.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp