Subject: IMAP APPEND as delivery agent?

From: Mark Musone <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 13:36:54 -0400 (EDT)

Hi,

Can anybody tell me if it's a bad idea to use the imap APPPEND
for the delivery agent??

Why or why not?

I'm thinking of making a perl script as the local delivery agent, and
it connects to one of X imap servers to do the actual delivery of the message.

This way I can have many imap servers, with any number of seperate incoming
smtp servers.

Thanks,

Mark Musone
[email-masked]

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 11:09:02 -0700 (PDT)

> Can anybody tell me if it's a bad idea to use the imap APPPEND

I think that it is a bad idea.

It is certainly possible to do so, but you'll need to address the IMAP
authentication requirement in some way (basically, your Perl script will need
to know how to authenticate to that IMAP server as that user).  You'll also
have a lot of additional RTTs, not to mention additiional IMAP sessions!

There are ways that you can work around these problems; it's all a function of
how creative you are on what constitutes "authentication" and a "mailbox
name".  But I suspect that you'll end up going to a lot of work, only to find
that you could have gotten the same or better performance by solving the
distributed SMTP problem and using SMTP instead.

If you do the experiment, I'll be very interested in the results.