[Vmail-discuss] IMAP and webmail solutions

Chris Lightfoot chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tue, 14 Aug 2001 10:20:51 +0100


On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 03:57:23PM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 11:38:13PM +0100, Paul Warren wrote:
> > An interesting question.  Chris and I are currently developing ReMail, a
> > webmail program based on IMAP (using a proxy to maintain connections
> 
> Are you doing this from scratch or using existing code? Acmemail/sparkle
> (Perl) and the IMP/Horde (PHP) spring immediately to mind.
> 
> http://www.astray.com/acmemail/devel/ -- the project was handed off a
> few months ago -- http://acmemail.sourceforge.net/

My opinion (Paul will shout if he disagrees) is that IMP
sucks, for several reasons, most notably that it is slow,
historically full of security holes, and full of graphic
design (and, worse, JavaScript). Acmemail looks relatively
plausible until you observe that it uses CClient (boo!)
and logs in to the POP/IMAP server for every page view,
storing the user's password in an RDBMS.

ReMail is written from scratch, but with extensive use of
modules from CPAN. It is intended to have extremely clean
design (read: no graphic design), no JavaScript, no
frames, etc. I _may_ write a decent message composer in
Java, if I can be bothered.

It will come with a (mostly complete) patch to the WU IMAP
server to cache metadata for BSD mailspools, which offers
a substantial performance improvement, and an IMAP proxy
which allows each page view to pick up an existing IMAP
session, and removes the need to store user passwords.

-- 
Chris Lightfoot -- www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/
 ``What lawyers call intellectual property is
   no more than theft from the public domain.''  (Alex Mueller-Maguhn)