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.
Keeping the message files around, and the message details in the database, is
useful for IMAP sessions that haven't seen/processed the removal of a message
yet and try to fetch it. Before, we would return errors. Similarly, a session
that has a mailbox selected that is removed can (at least in theory) still read
messages.
The mechanics to do this need keeping removed mailboxes around too. JMAP needs
that anyway, so we now keep modseq/createseq/expunged history for mailboxes
too. And while we're at it, for annotations as well.
For future JMAP support, we now also keep the mailbox parent id around for a
mailbox, with an upgrade step to set the field for existing mailboxes and
fixing up potential missing parents (which could possibly have happened in an
obscure corner case that I doubt anyone ran into).
REPLACE can be used to update draft messages as you are editing. Instead of
requiring an APPEND and STORE of \Deleted and EXPUNGE. REPLACE works
atomically.
It has a syntax similar to APPEND, just allows you to specify the message to
replace that's in the currently selected mailbox. The regular REPLACE-command
works on a message sequence number, the UID REPLACE commands on a uid. The
destination mailbox, of the updated message, can be different. For example to
move a draft message from the Drafts folder to the Sent folder.
We have to do quite some bookkeeping, e.g. for updating (message) counts for
the mailbox, checking quota, un/retraining the junk filter. During a
synchronizing literal, we check the parameters early and reject if the replace
would fail (eg over quota, bad destination mailbox).
