I suggest that you buy a copy of the following two books:
1) "Internet Email Protocols: A Developer's Guide", by Kevin Johnson,
published by Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-43288-9.
2) "Managing IMAP", by Dianna Mullet & Kevin Mullet, published by
O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-00012-X.
The first book describes the various Internet email protocols, including
IMAP, and how they work. The second book describes how to manage an IMAP
service and in particular the UW and Cyrus servers.
On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, Karim-Antoine wrote:
> - I would like to know the name of the mechanism that refresh automically
> the folder seen when a message arrives into it? It is great! Could it work
> for all the folders of any imap servers and not only for the seen one?
The IMAP server automatically announces any new mail that is delivered
into the currently open ("selected") mailbox. It does not announce new
mail delivered into other mailboxes, until you open those mailboxes. In
each server session, you may have one mailbox open at a time. Thus, if
you want announcements for three mailboxes simultaneously, you must have
three server sessions.
> - is there any mechanism which allows to make a search directly onto the
> imap server without needed to download messages?
Yes
> (Is there any mail client
> supporting this by now?)
Yes. Clients that do this have existed for 18 years.
> If yes, is it using imap url and would it allow to
> parse it and directly extract the message?
Currently, IMAP URLs are not used for much.
> - what are the essentials security considerations?
Read the Mullet book.
One final comment: Your desire to use ACLs, bulletin boards, and shared
folders suggests that in the long term, you will probably want to use
Cyrus. However, I recommend that you start with using UW since it is
simpler to install and understand. Then, after you understand how IMAP
works, you can then change to Cyrus.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
