On Wed, 5 May 2010, UCTC Sysadmin wrote:
I don't know what other formats are available, moreover the "mbox" format I thought was actually the canonical format of a file containing multiple email messages and is used as well by POP.
It depends upon which POP server you use. The POP server in the IMAP package (UW or Panda) uses the same internal library as the IMAP server, and thus supports all the alternative formats. There's a file called formats.txt in the documentation that talks a little bit about it.
After reading about the Cyrus IMAP server I decided not to allow "it" to determine to me what I could and couldn't do without it; uw-imap "plays with others".
UW and Panda are probably the only servers that do this strictly, although Dovecot comes a lot closers than most. Just about every IMAP server wants to use its own preferred format which is never mbox format. Not even UW. The default format is mbox, but that never was preferred.
If they can understand the difference between TCP and UDP, they can understand state.
I wouldn't be so certain. If you look at a lot of applications these days, they blat out a query, and read an answer. If they don't get an answer in what they consider to be a suitable time, they drop the connection and try again. Put another way, they treat TCP just like UDP, only with this strange and annoying "connection" stuff that they don't understand why it's there. Ironically, the original design for IMAP was for it to be UDP based. I was talked into making it be stateful and TCP based.
Well, with Thunderbird at least the avenue is (still?) open to muck with the source. Perhaps when I've nothing else to do, try to rewrite their IMAP support to behave properly and send them the code, or (ha ha) offer my IMAP client as a "plugin" for Thunderbird (ha ha.)
I would, if I were paid to do so. The problem is, it doesn't seem as if there is any market for email clients (and hence funding) these days.
I'm averse to storing user mail in a noncompatible format (meaning the POP server can't play) but may have to, for these users at least (I'll put them in their own sandbox.) If POP supports the mix format, then that objection vanishes.
Which POP server? If it's qpopper, then it probably does not support mix. If it's ipop3d (bundled with imapd), then it does.
Argh, obviously the question becomes how does one convert existing mail folders to mix format ... or is there a magic cookie such that the "mix handler" knows to bow out, and or is there any automatic (blind) way that upon first use the program can do a conversion in the background? All I'd need is a filter to convert "mbox" to "mix", and stop the users getting in until that is done.
There's a program called mixcvt that will do that. -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list Imap-uw@u.washington.edu http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
