[Dovecot] looking for IMAP testing tool

[Brian Candler]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 09:48:02AM -0400, Phil Howard wrote:
>    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.

If you can do SMTP, you can do IMAP. This should get you started:

a login foo at bar.com xyzzy
a select inbox               -- or "a examine inbox" for read-only
a fetch 1:15 (rfc822)
a store 1:15 +flags (\Deleted)
a expunge
a logout

Also useful:

a namespace        -- folder separator chars
a list "" "*"      -- list folder hierarchy

Flick through RFC3501 for anything else you need.

>    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.

As suggested by someone else, you can use 'fetchmail' to do that. Normally
it delivers using SMTP, but with appropriate flags I believe it can pipe all
the retrieved mail to stdout.  And if these are all separate mailboxes, POP3
will do for your purposes anyway.

Regards,

Brian.