[Dovecot] looking for IMAP testing tool

[Brian Candler]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 05:32:14PM -0400, Phil Howard wrote:
> What I need is a program that already has all the logic to do IMAP as a
> client already in it.  This isn't about testing IMAP logic per-se.  It's
> about making sure mail is going through OK, and logins that should fail will
> fail, and mail deliveries that should fail will fail (for example mail from
> a computer listed as blocked should never show up in the mailbox designated
> to test that, along with mail that has keywords specifically marked as "is
> always spam").

Then you're testing the whole environment: you'll need to deliver mail
either by making SMTP connections or by invoking your LDA (e.g.  sendmail)
and piping the mail in - with some way of forcing it to look "spammy" or
"not spammy" - to check the blocking.  Then you'll use IMAP to retrieve
them.  This is clearly more than testing just IMAP; rather, you're testing
the whole mail server platform and its configs.

I did something like this for linnet.org (warning: ancient project). I wrote
ruby scripts which would invoke exim for mail delivery, although rather than
fetch them via IMAP I tested in the filesystem directly that they had
arrived in the Maildir.

FWIW, the code is at rubyforge.org/projects/linnet (under "SCM", fetch cvs)
and the tests are in src/test/test-exim.rb, but I'm certainly not suggesting
you use this.

I don't know of any ready-made test framework for what you want, and I
suspect it would end up looking much like a programming language by the time
you were able to configure all the different tests for processing different
flavours of incoming mail.

Regards,

Brian.