looking for Cyrus mail format documentation

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>A couple people have suggested to me that I use Cyrus-IMAP as
>opposed to Courier-IMAP, and have given some good arguments
>for that decision direction.  However, I have still have one
>show stopper for that switch: some external programs that work
>directly with the storage space of all the mail.  Due to the
>nature of some of these programs, accessing that mail by means
>of the IMAP protocol or any delivery protocol is not an option.

You'd need to change how those applications work.  Cyrus is a sealed box,
external access to the mailstore is forbidden.  One of the many reasons Cyrus is
so fast and stable (stable, at least for us, in almost a geological sence, very
impressive).

>What I want to examine at this point is the potential ease of
>converting those programs to work with the format Cyrus-IMAP
>stores its mail.  

I think you pretty much can't.

>I've looked around the web site and the source file tree and I
>find no documentation on this format.  I have been told two
>different stories about references to other formats it is like.
>But then, I've also heard people tell me Cyrus-IMAP really
>does use Maildir format (and as far as I can see, that simply
>is not true).

It does not use maildir.  It actually can use several storage backends, flat
file to sleepcat and some others.  Rumor of an SQL backend,  that might be what
your looking for.

>I was also looking for documentation on SASL.  That I found in
>the RFCs.  That's the kind of thing I'm looking for regarding
>the file formats.

SASL documentation?!  There is some floating about.  I love SASL, but the shreds
of documentation are universally terrible.