List,
I have the task in my hands of creating a web mail application. Initial
thoughts lead me to think I would use an external popper to pop mail and
parse it into a database for retrieval by the modperl application. The only
problem here is that I must provide the implementation of the mail storage
and folder management etc. Something I would rather not spend my time on. So
my thoughts turned to IMAP. Retrieve the mail from an IMAP server. IMAP
itself supports most mail management methods such as move message, delete
message, save draft, mark seen etc. So a few lines of perl later I had a
PerlChildInitHandler which connected to the IMAP server and saved the
connection object. I wanted to know if people saw any immediate problems
with this solution and also if anyone could explain the following
percularities.
If I store a single imap object in $imap, e.g.
my $imap;
sub connect {
my ($self,$centro_id) = @_;
print STDERR $imap,"\n";
unless (defined $imap) {
print STDERR "Connecting to IMAP for $centro_id\n";
$imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new( Server => 'cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu',
User => 'anonymous',
Password => '[EMAIL PROTECTED]',
);
}
return $imap;
}
This seems to successfully save the connection object. However if I attempt
to store the object in a hash, e.g.
my %imap_cache;
sub connect {
my ($self,$centro_id) = @_;
print STDERR $imap,"\n";
unless (exists $imap_cache{$centro_id}) {
print STDERR "Connecting to IMAP for $centro_id\n";
$imap_cache{$centro_id} = Mail::IMAPClient->new( Server =>
'cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu',
User => 'anonymous',
Password => '[EMAIL PROTECTED]',
);
}
return $imap_cache{$centro_id};
}
I seem to have intermitent success in retrieving an already connected
object. Using the first example, as far as I can tell the object remains
available flawlessley. But storing the object in the hash doesn't. Am I
making a mistake here?
Another question sprung to mind, should I think about using Persistant::Base
or some similar approach to store the IMAP objects?, or should I lean
towards Randal's and others suggestions of having a seperate (possibles SOAP
or LWP::Daemon or even apache server in single user mode) server
specifically designed for performing IMAP requests?
Finally, does anyone with experience in having to write webmail interfaces
see any problems with using the functionality provided by IMAP.
Richard
p.s. Yes quite obviously if I have 100 children then I'll be connected to
the IMAP server 100 times per user, hence possibly the need to have a either
a dedicated daemon connected to the IMAP server once or some successfuly way
of sharing IMAP objects between children.
