🚀 go-pugleaf

Yes, IMAP2bis allows for transmission of the MIME structure of a message.
However, IMAP2bis only helps for retrieving messages from a remote mailbox.
What about local access to a mailbox?  IMAP2bis clients can determine MIME
structure without the entire text of a message, but what about the server?
How can an IMAP2bis server efficiently store the MIME structure of a
message so that client requests can be serviced quickly without additional
parsing or large memory requirements?

I agree that a sender should not generate and send a table of contents
with a MIME message since, yes, that is redundant information.  I am
suggesting that efficient processing of MIME messages by the *receiver*
would be facilitated by being able to store a TOC to speed up future
accesses.  Extracting MIME structure information can mean a large
performance penalty due to the potentially large size of a MIME message.
A TOC summarizes MIME structure information and makes it available
efficiently since there is no longer a need to parse the entire note.

There are many ways to implement a TOC; I'm curious and want to know
if others have implemented a TOC mechanism or if there is some TOC
standard/RFC I should look at.  If not, I guess a TOC mechanism is
something that can be considered private to a specific mail handler,
and as such, can be implemented in any way.

Thanks for the quick responses!
- William Chung.
IBM Research, T.J. Watson Research Center
whchung@watson.ibm.com