[Vmail-discuss] Webmail for vmail-sql

[Paul Warren]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 10:40:07AM +0100, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
> > Generally, there are two approaches:
> > 1) use some physical filespace for each user (created on demand), eg.
> >    /var/lib/webmail/username@domain/(addressbook|folders)
> >    The directory must be writable by the webserver user, which might be
> >    insecure (unless you use some SuExec stuff).
> > 2) keep all data in SQL database, folders usually as BLOB-s;
> >    one could use vmail-sql database and tables for this approach.
> 
> We could always hack new functionality in to the protocol,
> though I'm reluctant to do this. It doesn't get around the
> problems of searching or of writing new messages to
> folders, though I suppose that the latter of those could
> be accomodated using yet more nasty hacks.

...by which time we have implemented a significant subset of the
functionality of an IMAP server, with the disadvantage of using a
non-standard protocol.  

The more I think about this, the clearer it is to me that the only real
solution is creating a decent vmail aware IMAP server, either writing
it from scratch or finding a decent one and improving that.

WRT writing from scratch - whilst writing ReMail my opinion of the IMAP
protocol has oscillated between "thankfully all this really complex
functionality is taken care of by the server" and "this has clearly been
designed to make writing IMAP servers easy".  So I suspect that, on
average, the tedium of writing an IMAP server is "moderate".

Paul