Default specialusealways to on

[brong]

From: Greg Banks
Bugzilla-Id: 3689
Version: 2.5.x (next)
Owner: Bron Gondwana

[brong]

From: Greg Banks

This behaviour this enables is necessary for iPhones, but it's not obvious to sysadmins that they need to enable this to make iPhones behave better. We should be compatible by default.

[brong]

From: Bron Gondwana

Google says there's still a client out there which doesn't work, so I'm leaving this targetted for "Future" for now.

[rsto]

RFC 6154 states that

The extended LIST command MAY return SPECIAL-USE attributes even if the client does not specify the return option.

Plus: we haven't seen any clients complain at FastMail since specialusealways is set to on.

That's good enough reason to change the default to 'on', and this is done in 9f98ad5

[nicolan]

@rsto What are the implications of swapping this for people upgrading versions who don't have this explicitly defined? Plus also: release notes.

[rsto]

@nicola installations that had set this value to false (or not at all) might now experience an issue, if old, broken clients can't handle the RFC-compliant answer. IMHO the chances for this are slim, but surely it's possible.

Do you mean I should update the release notes?

[nicolan]

Are you saying that specialusealways shouldn't actually even be an option? In fact that there is no real reason (any more) to have this switched off? I love removing options that should just be regular functionality and not a toggle.

Yes, I think we need release notes in case people had this set to false or unset, so they know that it's now changed.

[rsto]

No, we can't remove that option: installations that want to keep using clients that can't handle specialuse flags will want to disable 'specialusealways'. We just want to enable it by default, since it's OK by the RFC and can solve hiccups with older iOS clients that in fact, expect it to be on.

I'll be happy to write a short note in the release notes, but how to do that?

[nicolan]

I made some placeholder release notes! docsrc/imap/download/release-notes/3.1/x/3.1.0-dev.rst

It should be obvious where your config changes goes. :)

[rsto]

thanks @nicolan . done in 3878ee0