Subject: Re: IMAP daemon as Mail-user agent

From: [email-masked] (Trey Harris)
Date: 2 May 1995 01:31:50 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Forrest Gump <[email-masked]> wrote:
>In other words you are planning to write something better than Pine.

Better than Pine?  I'm writing a filtering agent.  Since Pine isn't a 
filtering agent, how can any given filtering agent be "better than Pine"?
-- 
Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
  System Administrator, Project Isis, Office of Information Technology
                       The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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From: [email-masked] (Forrest Gump)
Date: 2 May 1995 00:10:00 GMT

IMAP an MUA ? 

IMAP is a driver, more appropriately a protocol by which mailfile gets
transmitted. It is a much much improved POP3 like protocol.
(read Terry Gray's fine article on the diff. between IMAP and POP)

You can write an MUA which uses IMAP to download mail from a mail-server.

Good Luck!

Trey Harris writes in comp.mail.pine:
 +  (Is there a newsgroup for IMAP? A grep imap in my active file revealed
 +  nothing...)

 +  I am writing a Mail-user agent (MUA) for my users.  Not a generalized 
 +  program for their everyday mailreading, but rather to do some things that 
 +  my users are always asking me how to do and takes twenty or thirty 
 +  commands in pine (more if they don't yet have the aggregate-command-set 
 +  enabled).  However, since the program would have to access the mailboxes 
 +  and change their contents, it does meet the definition of a MUA.

 +  Since my users operate over a sealed IMAP server, we cannot allow them a 
 +  mail filtering program such as procmail (if anyone has ideas on this, let 
 +  me know).  So, I'm writing a simple program that will filter a user's 
 +  current mailbox at login time via IMAP.

 +  My question is this: it appears to me that, if I use IMAP and only IMAP 
 +  (i.e., I don't write anything in my script that will deal with Unix 
 +  textfile INBOXes), that I can jettison all the code one ordinarily must 
 +  write to deal with mailbox locking, because the IMAP daemon is already 
 +  doing them for me.

 +  Am I correct?  In essence, in an IMAP client/server situation, isn't it 
 +  the IMAP daemon which is the MUA for mail reading, since it is handling 
 +  all the locking issues and mail message formats?

 +  (Oh, by the way, I'm not totally aversive to writing mailbox-locking 
 +  routines, I've just never done it before.  If anyone knows where I can go 
 +  to read everything I ever wanted to know about mailbox locking, please do 
 +  let me know.)
 +  -- 
 +  Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
 +    System Administrator, Project Isis, Office of Information Technology
 +                         The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

--
[email-masked] | Mac*Chat ListOwner | http://monroe.temple.edu

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 09:07:56 -0700 (PDT)

>  +  (Is there a newsgroup for IMAP? A grep imap in my active file revealed

There is an IMAP mailing list.  Send a message to
[email-masked] to subscribe... 

>  +  current mailbox at login time via IMAP.

Great!  Let us know how it works...

>  +  write to deal with mailbox locking, because the IMAP daemon is already 

Correct, mailbox locking is the responsibility of the IMAP server in this 
situation.

>  +  all the locking issues and mail message formats?

I wouldn't call IMAP an MUA, just a message access protocol :)

BTW, are you writing the IMAP code from scratch or using the c-client
library? 

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 2 May 1995 19:50:26 GMT

>[email-masked] to subscribe... 

    I note with glee that, similar to the pine-info mailing list, the IMAP
discussion is archived on the Pine FTP server.
    This means that it can be accessed via anonymous IMAP, for people who
want to catch up, but without downloading the whole archive, or for people
who want to drop in and listen without actually subscribing.

    As noted in a previous post, the syntax for accessing it is specific to
Pine3.xx and IMAP2bis, but for now it looks like this list, and a list for
discussing the C-Client, can be snooped on with folder specifications
Folder-Name *{ftp.cac.washington.edu/anonymous}imap/[imap_archive]  or
                                                   /[c-client_archive] .
There may well be other mailing list archives elsewhere on this server,
or perhaps there are other servers with additional mailing list archives
which would be of interest to people to browse in this manner...

    Now I have yet another excuse not to have a life!  Yay!!

-- 
 Barry Bouwsma, will crash computers for chocolate and dental care
    Please direct mail to  <[email-masked]> (MIME-aware)
LOAD "SENDMAIL",8,1
                            driving a 300 baud Trabant on the Datenautobahn