Brian Hayden wrote:
Have you investigated Prayer? That's what we use, in a modded version, because it maintains persistent IMAP connections (among other reasons). You could think of it as an IMAP client that happens to be using a web browser to draw back to your screen, as if it were X Windows. It's a sort of clumsy analogy but in the end that's more or less what it amounts to.
Beat me to it, and me having spent most of the day porting my patches to Prayer 1.0.x to the new version 1.2.3 :)
When we chose Prayer, the persistent IMAP connections were the main selling point (as they were with "IMHO" a Roxen-webserver-based client written in Pike, a language nobody else seems to have heard of).
Prayer keeps an IMAP connection open for up to 10 minutes, AFAIR, but remembers the users session (session id is stored either in a cookie or the URL) for 30 minutes (or two hours on the compose screen).
Prayer's user interface is a bit old-fashioned, but is undergoing some serious rewriting at the moment (hence the need for porting my patches). It's server load is very low both on the webmail server and on the IMAP server.
I think Dovecot's cacheing may help the more common Webmail apps out there such as IMP and Squirrelmail and probably Roundcube (which does some cacheing of its own), plus there's imapproxy or Dovecot's auth cache if it's authentication that's expensive.
Another persistent IMAP Webmail app may be Web-Alpine from UW, but I haven't tried it out yet. If it's expecting to be talking to UW-IMAP it'll need to use persistent connections!
Chris -- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, [EMAIL PROTECTED] IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094
