how to shoot yourself in the foot with imap

[rone]

Seen in the Other Place:

Jan Ingvoldstad:

In order to fire the gun, you must fill your clip with rounds. As you attempt to insert the clip, you discover that the gun is a revolver, and the clip is useless. Instead, you must use a speedloader. The speedloader jams. When the gun is finally loaded, you attempt to fire, only to discover that it won't fire when fully loaded. You must reduce the number of bullets, one by one, until you only have one left. Then you must play Russian roulette. There is a one in six chance that you'll shoot yourself in the head, but you won't hit your foot.

allbery:

You forgot to mention that the gun takes a different type of bullet depending on who you want to shoot, and if you attempt to use the wrong type of bullet, it jams.

Malcolm Ray:

And while you're attempting to load, Mark Crispin wanders up, says "that's not a gun, *this* is a gun", and shoots himself in the foot.

Peter da Silva:

And after he's been carted off to hospital, you notice that he's been hauling a miniature foundry in a cart... because his gun works but you have to reforge it every time you want to change rounds.

Comments

[waider.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, one of the admins on the box that hosts my site was tooling with IMAP last night and briefly broke things. After I mauled my mailer into coping with the breakage, he undid what he'd done, which broke things again. So now my mailer knows how to deal with two different types of preauth IMAP, and automatically chooses the appropriate one. Go me, etc.

I'd be kinda interested in an explication of the above. The only problem I've ever really had with IMAP was that I looked at doing a shared IMAP folder and the first part of the instruction was to rebuild from source, at which point I decided it wasn't something I really needed.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

If i recall correctly, the comment that got this started was:

Rob Chanter: How difficult would a bare-bones IMAP server be?
Greg Andrews: Hmmm... I have a gun, and I have a foot. Just how difficult
would this be?

I am given to understand that the IMAP protocol is hairy as hell and that Mark Crispin is a contemptible toad. Beyond that, i could not say.