On Tuesday, Aug 19, 2003, at 16:39 Europe/Helsinki, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
Well, UW-IMAP supports that. I've actually thought about supporting as well :) It would work better to poll the pop3 box only when IMAP's INBOX is being accessed by IMAP client. Luckily this can be implemented as a plugin.
it's one of those "just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should" situations. One of the big problems is that you bypass a lot of normal mail system functionality like antivirus or antispam filters. In my antispam system (camram), I'm currently using procmail as a way of intercepting the mail stream and working on the messages.
Depositing messages via an imap backdoor would totally bypass filtering.
Nothing would prevent the same plugin from putting the messages through spam and virus checkers.
Additionally, if you use a collect pop3 box and multidrop distribution, you reduce your security exposure because only one password known (i.e. that for the pop box) versus 1 for every user.
I meant that you'd still use multiple normal pop3 boxes. You could have per-user configuration for the pop3 box locations and passwords. Either using some ~/.dovecotrc file or ANNOTATEMORE extension once we support that.