Marc Perkel, 23.05.2007 (d.m.y):
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? For example, personalized server settings. Suppose for example I want Thunderbird to edit my server side white lists or black lists or any other setting? Wouldn't it be nice if IMAP supported these changes?
AFAIK, the "M" in IMAP stands for "Mail", not for "Calendar" or "Schedules".
The connection is made. It's a secure connection that's been authenticated.
You can also use LDAP and/or Kerberos to authenticate your users for other services - e.g. HTTP/WebDAV access to their Calendars, for managing their Sieve filters and so on. Thus, your proposal sounds to me a bit like reinventing the wheel. And I think that what we want is dovecot, not Exchange.
Nevertheless, feel free to give me $500. ;-)
Gruss/Regards, Christian Schmidt
-- Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain