looking for Cyrus mail format documentation

[Rob Siemborski]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Earl R Shannon wrote:

> Cyrus documentation calls the IMAP server a black box. This is defined
> to mean that the users do not have access to the account/data accept
> through the well defined ( :-/ ) IMAP protocol. This black box concept
> also extends to a certain extent to the administrators of the servers.

Obviously the mail store access is not limited to the IMAP protocol, one
can also use LMTP and POP3, and NNTP if you're using the 2.2 branch.

There's also some utilities such as deliver that can let you do various
things to the mail store.

> Best way to learn something is through experience. Set up a server and
> look at how it does things. If you opt for compiling it yourself choose
> the flat file options for all the databases. This will leave the data in
> a format that is human readable, sorta, and you can figure out what is
> going on.

This is really only useful for educational purposes, not for actually
running a mail store where other programs want direct access.  The only
way to accomplish the latter legitimately is to use the cyrus source
directly.

Often times mailbox access semantics change slightly from version to
version, and if you're not using all the same code (which assumes it is
only dealing with one version of itself), then you can run into trouble.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper