The IMAP METADATA Extension

The METADATA extension to the Internet Message Access Protocol permits clients and servers to maintain "annotations" or "meta data" on IMAP servers. It is possible to have annotations on a per-mailbox basis or on the server as a whole. For example, this would allow comments about the purpose of a particular mailbox to be "attached" to that mailbox, or a "message of the day" containing server status information to be made available to anyone logging in to the server. Change History (to be removed prior to publication as an RFC) Changes from -10 to -11: 1. Added new paragraph to indicate that values may be read-only or computed. 2. /admin server annotation value now must be a URI. 3. Clarified that SORT and THREAD extensions are not required. 4. Fixed use of undefined entries in some examples. 5. Fixed many examples. 6. Added IANA registration for LIST-EXTENDED items. 7. Added match type and collation identifier to the LIST-EXTENDED selection option. 8. Made support for IMAP-I18N a requirement. 9. Minor text clarifications applied. 10. Remove mailbox list set atomicity requirement. 11. Clarified that annotations can only be set on mailboxes that actually exist. Changes from -09 to -10: 1. Updated to rfc 4466 reference. 2. Reworded data model description. 3. Reworked LIST-EXTENDED so that responses have metadata items after the mailbox info. 4. Various spelling fixes. Changes from -08 to -09: 1. Remove content-language attribute and reference. 2. Changed capability and command names. 3. Revised abstract. Changes from -07 to -08: 1. Changed 'string' formal syntax to 'list-mailbox' and 'astring' for entry/attribute names. 2. Updated examples to match new astring syntax. 3. Changed CAPABILITY name due to incompatible syntax change. 4. Removed content-type attribute. 5. Added Content-type to IANA registration for entries. 6. Removed vendor attributes. 7. Fixed examples in section 3.3 for multi-mailbox and multi-entry cases. 8. Removed wildcards for attributes. 9. Entry/attributes can now only be ASCII. 10. Tied up text wrt storing/fetching. 11. Added Conventions section 12. Entry/attributes MUST NOT contain consecutive or trailing '/' or '.'.