Re: [Nmh-workers] IMAP/nmh, again

[Paul Vixie]

Ken Hornstein wrote:
> > connect to the imap service and authenticate
> > open a unix domain socket and listen() to it
> > on each connection:
>
> So, alright, I admit that you're more experienced than I especially at
> the "big picture", so I want to understand exactly what you're proposing.
>
> Is this, essentially, a local IMAP proxy?  It keeps local cached state
> about all interesting mailboxes, receives notifications about mailbox
> changes, and serves IMAP out locally to nmh?

that's the bare minimum of what an nmh-agent should be doing, yes.

> If that is what you mean, then I see the advantages there!  But ... that
> seems complicated.  And ... I think that has been done already?  See:
>
>         http://www.imapproxy.org/
>
> Is that what you were thinking of?  I mean, modulo a few changes;
> the security bits seem like it would be easy to add to that and listening
> on Unix domain socket would be trivial.

yes. although prayermail had a lot more session state than just an imap 
connection, compared to squirrelmail.

> As for security ... well, I can understand if you're the paranoid sort,
> you wouldn't be comfortable putting your password in a .netrc file (it
> seems like pretty much every email application does the equivalent
> nowadays).

i keep it in a KDE password safe which i have to unlock while i'm working.

>  Or you COULD use Kerberos.  I know the Cyrus-IMAP supports
> that and I am 100% sure our Kerberos support works fine in nmh.

i actually have kerberos for everything else, but not for dovecot yet, 
though i concede you make a good point about how i could solve this 
problem better.

> > or we can do the above as v1, leaving code points in the
> > connect-to-proxy api and protocol so as to select by default "i want to
> > talk to the imap connection", or later on, select "i want to talk to the
> > indexer" or "i want the list of folders, or messages, or whatever."
>
> Sure, I am hoping the future undesigned API would be flexible enough
> to work with multiple backends.

at the moment i want to be able to get the "you have new mail" behaviour 
in my shell (see "mesg y") that delivermail used to offer me (after 
writing into /var/mail/vixie), so i know when to type "inc". but i could 
also imagine automating that so that it would fetch synchronously 
without polling, and then run my slocal stuff or the modern equivalent. 
none of that has worked for me for the last 10 years. and when i hear 
you say you want to connect to imap only when and while asked, it means 
IDLE won't happen, and i'm not closer to where i want to be. so, for a 
lot of small reasons, i'm hoping for an nmh-agent that keeps a 
persistent imap connection open.


--
P Vixie