Webmail applications that are kind to the IMAP server?

[Cyrus Daboo]

Hi,

--On Monday, September 2, 2002 8:33 PM +0100 Dominic Ijichi 
<dom at ijichi.org> wrote:

| Try this - it runs as a non-privileged user on a non-privileged port and
| talks to the imap daemon for the webmail app, holding persistence.  Works
| very well, and I've noticed a definite speed increase.  Designed for IMP,
| but I guess it should work with others?
|
| http://www.kuleuven.net/projects/imapproxy/

This solves some problems and possibly creates others. It does handle the 
tcp conection and authentication performance issues, but does not handle 
the SELECT/SORT/FETCH issue. In most cases the later really ought to be the 
significant one - in a closed environment tcp connect should certainly be 
quick.

It does introduce some issues wrt data that the server might queue up 
whilst the webclient is in its 'logged out' state, but the proxy is still 
logged in to the IMAP server. There is some code in there that does an 
'EXAMINE INBOX' when the webclient logs out (note it uses INBOX even if 
some other mailbox is in use). I think that is designed to try and prevent 
the loss of information from unsolicted server responses, but its not a 
good solution because the server will still queue up information even for 
an EXAMINE state. What would be better is using the 'UNSELECT' IMAP command 
(its an extension that some - e.g. CMU - servers support that allows a 
client to effectively 'close' a mailbox without logging out). Alternatively 
it should use an EXAMINE/CLOSE sequence to do the same.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo