Hi friends,
During some time I've been working on adding support for a few more protocols
to libcurl. The work is not done yet, but I wanted to provide the news to let
you know and allow you all to prepare and jump in.
The new protocols are as the subject says: IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. They will
include their SSL/TLS-based variations IMAPS, POP3S and SMTPS as well as the
"STARTTLS" approach to upgrade from plain connection to SSL/TLS.
IMAP and POP3 of course download data (mail) from the given server and they
should work with the URL formats defined by:
RFC5092 IMAP URL
RFC2384 POP URL Scheme
SMTP is for sending data to a server, and unfortunately SMTP doesn't have a
defined URL syntax so I'm still a bit undecided on how it'll work exactly.
There's a mailto: URL format, but that doesn't really work for SMTP. I'm open
for suggestions from you libcurl hackers on this!
There was once an initial take at SMTP URLs, but it never took off. That draft
is still available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-earhart-url-smtp-00.txt
Except for that URL syntax problem with SMTP, these three protocols apply very
nicely to the generic libcurl concept. They will "just work" like the other
protocols and existing applications will suddenly be able to tranfer data over
more protocols. These protocols will also be possible to "disable" just like
other protocols at build-time to reduce size/complexity for your embedded
system situations etc, or at run-time to prevent them from getting used in
your application even if the library itself knows about them.
These protocols may of course not be provided in a rock solid fashion to start
with, so please be gentle with me but DO try them out and help us out get them
polished and functional.
--
/ daniel.haxx.se
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