[Dovecot] looking for IMAP testing tool

[Phil Howard]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 05:24, Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Yes, that is what I want to be testing.  So I need a way to send mail via
SMTP (including TLS and login authentication) as well as picking it up via
IMAP.  But I chose to only ask for the IMAP piece of it here (and the SMTP
piece of it on the Postfix mailing list ... to which Wietse suggested
"expect" and "openssl s_client" which I think I can handle using "pexpect"
in Python).  I know enough SMTP to do that end of things.  I don't know the
IMAP protocol at all, so something already built would help.  But I only
need a subset which is to just pick up all email from the inbox of a given
user at domain, deleting them from the server while depositing them in a
designated directory.  Each different class of test would be using a
different mailbox.  Some tests will, when things work as expected, get no
mail at all (basically a test for rejecting mail).


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.
>

An IMAP library might be doable (though not in Perl since I don't know that
language and don't have the time to learn it), but the basic "just pick up
and delete all mail" would be sufficient.