[Edbrowse-dev] imap

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

This is perhaps more thinking ahead...

The most common request from users is:
why doesn't edbrowse work on this site,
and is usually an object or method that I haven't implemented yet.
The next request is:
what about imap?
I started looking at wikipedia imap and rfc3501.
There's a lot going on here.
I think there are three options for us.

1. Access an imap server much as we access a pop3 server today.
Use port 143 instead of 110.
Many of the commands are the same, at least functionally,
and of course there are many new commands.
We wouldn't have to use all the new commands.

2. Try to use a linux imap library to help us,
the way we use curl for http and ftp.
I don't even know if such exists and is easy to use.
It has now become a requirement that any libraries we use are
in linux and free bsd, since bsd is on board with us.

3. Ask the user to use a separate stand-alone program to pull
mail off an imap server and into a local mailbox file.
Edbrowse would then read the local mailbox file and pretend it was a mail server,
and present those mail messages to the user via the same interface as today.
Delete them (from the file rather than the mail server),
or same them to other files, or save attachments, etc, as we do today.

I would lean towards 3, but I might not understand what is going on here at all,
and I'm curious what others think.

Karl Dahlke