On 2005-08-16 13:43:46 -0400 Marc Perkel marc@perkel.com wrote:
Andrew Hutchings wrote:
On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 10:30 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
Would it really be all that useful though? I can't see it making dovecot 1.0 at least. SMTP is standard for mail relaying for a very good reason.
This is all just theoretical. The idea isn't to eliminate SMTP. Servers would still talk SMTP to each other. The advantage is that when you configure a client you would only have to configure the IMAP. It wouldn't require an additional step for setting up outgoing email. And on the server end you wouldn't have to set up SMTP authentication because the IMAP would already do that for you. IMAP would act as a transport to get the outgoing mail from the client to the SMTP server.
So, just a particular IMAP mailbox, then? And what would happen if you copied a random received email into that box? Say, one to the dovecot mailing list?
How do you do blind carbon copy? Despite the pseudo-header displayed by mail clients (and typically saved as a Bcc: header in a sent-mail box, if your MUA is configured to store sent mails), this is not supplied to the outgoing SMTP server as a header.
Or, in other words, how much header munging does the IMAP-send-enabled MUA
do, and how much is left to the IMAP-send-enabled imapd? If imapd sets SMTP
MAIL FROM:, does it also munge From:? Sender:? Resent-From:? List-From:?
X-Secret-Message-From:?
Not saying that these issues can't be resolved, just that they do exist, and consequently MUST be resolved; depending on how much complexity implementation requires of the server versus the MUA, you'll see different implementation results.
The two use cases suggested seem to be: reduce transmission time for sending/storing as sent-mail; reduce configuration complexity. For reduction of configuration complexity, it will depend on support for the capability in clients commonly used by less technical users. Reduction of transmission time alone seems marginal as a use case, given possible complexities and interoperability issues.
Amy!
Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine. -- Indigo Girls