On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 24.9.2005, at 01:18, Kenneth Porter wrote:
--On Friday, September 23, 2005 2:29 PM -0700 Dan Hollis <test3943395@anime.net> wrote:
Actually an idea i've had in mind for a while is something more akin to PAM, eg an end user definable plugin system for mailbox handling. dovecot etc would just use API calls to plugins. People can write whatever backend they want -- maildir, sql, even gdbm, csv, xml or WEBDAV if they feel like it. And anything could use the modules -- sendmail, postfix, procmail, etc. Agreed. Defining an API would be more useful than defining a format. Then one could plug in delivery and access modules with different storage modules. The API already exists, that's how mbox and maildir code is implemented separately (src/lib-storage/mail-storage.h). It could be simpler though and mailbox listing should be separated from mailbox accessing. That's also how I was planning on implementing ACLs, as a plugin that's called before the real storage. That's also how quota plugin already works.
I was suggesting implementing it in a global system-wide generic way, the way PAM is done. So it would become a project in and of itself, independent of dovecot. PAM is independent of anything else, but is used by dovecot, apache, radius, samba and a zillion other applications. It would be nice if a generic mailbox plugin system could be created in the same way.
PMM - pluggable mail modules? /etc/pmm.d/ and /lib/mail/ anyone? :)
-Dan