Forum OpenACS Development: Response to webmail contributors

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Posted by Mat Kovach on
Expect that quite a few people don't use IMAP for various reasons.  Some prefer havinig the webmail server directly on the mail server and access mail through the filesystem.

Others still use pop and/or apop.

Also, IMAP is not completely standard, handling files and folders for Cryus IMAP, Courier-Imap, and wu-imap is different and needs to be handled in the client code.

If would be silly to have:

login_imap_cyrus
login_imap_wuimapd
login_local_mbox
login_loacl_maildir

When you can have

login_mailbox type username password

Of if you have the user login and store the webmail config in OpenACS
you could have email_login user email_address to handle everything.
The real question is what type of webmail api's do we need and how should we store what data?

What are we going to do with mime messages? keep them in memory?  Get them from the mail server, create a temp file to store it, etc.?

The underlying modules are actually the easy part.  For the most part they have all been written, just need to be zapped into an underlying AOLserver/OpenACS model.

That is the part that needs discussion.  As Don said (and I agree) this is something for after the first release when things have settled down, base packages have stabalized and people have time to reflect :)