On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 10:14:04PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote: > > One of the > > options I want to investigate is making IMAP/POP3 accessible individual > > mailboxes fed by lei, such that a new subsystem maintainer could have a > > ready-made mailbox available to them without needing to > > subscribe/unsubscribe > > to a bunch of mailing lists. (This would be different from read-only imap > > mailboxes offered by public-inbox-imapd, since we'll be tracking individual > > message state. The POP3 bit would allow them to plug it into something like > > Gmail which allows sucking down remote POPs.) > > I think using the "-o v2:..." option for now would be the way to > go for making a v2 inbox available via -imapd (and it'll get > JMAP/POP3 support in the future).
I'm worried that read-only imap folders are going to cause problems for dumber imap clients, including mbsync. My goal is to make it easy for folks to use existing tools to which they are already accustomed, since my experience is that if the learning curve is too steep or requires too much fiddling to configure, the uptake is going to be extremely limited. On the other hand, a service that offers full search-based imap/pop3 folders is going to be an easy sell: - it works with any imap client as a simple extra account - it can be mirrored locally and synced two-ways via mbsync - it can be incorporated into existing services like gmail, so people can monitor things on the go - I can do clever things like suspend "lei up" runs if there was no access to the folder for over N weeks - we can use FS dedupe features since all messages are going to be identical after writing them out to maildirs The slightly harder part is making it easy for people to configure their search parameters, but I'm hoping to expose this via a git repo. I'm not implementing this right away, but I'm going to float this idea at plumbers to see what the reception is going to be. I believe this will be of interest to many devs, since this would allow them to no longer depend on their corporate mail servers and their mail-mangling ways. -K
