Plugging into the imap system

[Rob Mueller]

> There is some system (on freshmeat?) that has a special folder in IMAP
> for storing calendar events. The program uses the IMAP defined protocol
> though.

http://www.kolab.org/documentation.html

It's a reasonably interesting idea. Basically use a sort of folder=table and 
email=row database mapping to store the data. Ok more email = "structured 
XML blob of data", but the overall concept is that the IMAP server acts as a 
centralised store of information that multiple clients can sync from.

Actually a few nice things about this approach:
1. You reuse an existing protocol and servers rather than creating a bunch 
of new ones
2. Because IMAP is designed so the server is authoriative and you have long 
term connections, you can avoid many of the sync issues that "irregular 
sync" systems end up dealing with
3. Emails are immutable, so changing anything is a "delete + upload new" 
action, so again, other clients can easily detect when changes have occured 
on the server

I really wish the Bynari and Toltec Outlook plugins were just a bit more 
stable and sane though...

Rob