I disagree about SSH.
Firstly, how do virtual users fit into your proposed setup? Secondly, as a service provider to the general public, the absolute LAST thing I want to be doing is opening up SSH access to my servers.
Mark has a valid point in that you have to connect to the server via IMAP to get your mail, why should you have to have a second protocol to do other things with the same mailbox? And why worry about a whole second set of authentication when you've got a pre-authenticated connection ready and waiting?
I agree it's not portable, and not ideal (ie. look at M$ Exchange's handling of custom server features), but Timo's suggestion of using the METADATA extension may strike the ideal balance between an extensible feature and the IMAP standard.
Andy.
Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 06:55 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
Here's some thoughts I'd like to throw out there. I know it's not standard IMAP protocol but someone has to try new ideas first and I want to see what people (Timo) think of this.
IMAP establishes a connection between the client and the server. Wouldn't it be great if it could be a conduit to let custom Thunderbird plugins talk to custom server application over the IMAP interface?
Why do you always want to stuff everything into IMAP?
For example, personalized server settings.
Isn't there some protocol similar to IMAP that solves this?
Who likes this idea?
I strongly disagree with this idea. Too little definition, too much server dependence, not portable across installations.
IMHO defining some behaviour that is so little related to the original purpose of IMAP is counterproductive.
Besides, why do you need to do this with IMAP? There's a protocol that supports all this already, it's called ssh. You can even tunnel pre-auth IMAP tunnels through the same ssh connection :)
johannes
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