Once clients enable this extension, commands can no longer refer to "message
sequence numbers" (MSNs), but can only refer to messages with UIDs. This means
both sides no longer have to carefully keep their sequence numbers in sync
(error-prone), and don't have to keep track of a mapping of sequence numbers to
UIDs (saves resources).
With UIDONLY enabled, all FETCH responses are replaced with UIDFETCH response.
We were already generating previews of plain text parts for the webmail
interface, but we didn't store them, so were generating the previews each time
messages were listed.
Now we store previews in the database for faster handling. And we also generate
previews for html parts if needed. We use the first part that has textual
content.
For IMAP, the previews can be requested by an IMAP client. When we get the
"LAZY" variant, which doesn't require us to generate a preview, we generate it
anyway, because it should be fast enough. So don't make clients first ask for
"PREVIEW (LAZY)" and then again a request for "PREVIEW".
We now also generate a preview when a message is added to the account. Except
for imports. It would slow us down, the previews aren't urgent, and they will
be generated on-demand at first-request.
in some cases, they were interpreted as meaning "the first sequence/uid", but
it should always be "the last sequence/uid", just like patterns of the form
"123:*".
this wrong interpretation was used in the "fetch" command when combined with
"changedsince", and in the search command for some parameters, and during
expunge with an explicit uid range. the form "*" and "*:123" aren't very
common.
for conditional storing and quick resynchronisation (not sure if mail clients are actually using it that).
each message now has a "modseq". it is increased for each change. with
condstore, imap clients can request changes since a certain modseq. that
already allows quickly finding changes since a previous connection. condstore
also allows storing (e.g. setting new message flags) only when the modseq of a
message hasn't changed.
qresync should make it fast for clients to get a full list of changed messages
for a mailbox, including removals.
we now also keep basic metadata of messages that have been removed (expunged).
just enough (uid, modseq) to tell client that the messages have been removed.
this does mean we have to be careful when querying messages from the database.
we must now often filter the expunged messages out.
we also keep "createseq", the modseq when a message was created. this will be
useful for the jmap implementation.
for a uid set, the syntax <num>:* must be interpreted as <num>:<maxuid>. a
wrong check turned the uid set into <maxuid>:<maxuid>. that check was meant for
the case where <num> is higher than <maxuid>, in which case num must be
replaced with maxuid.
this affected "uid expunge" with a uid set, possibly causing messages marked
for deletion not to be actually removed, and this affected "search" with the
uid parameter, possibly not returning all messages that were searched for.
found while writing tests for upcoming condstore/qresync extensions.
