What I am thinking of is to run those tests before anything new is released. On the other hand I cannot even estimate how much work would be needed for this ...
Udo Rader
You could develop a test suite using something like perl. The approach would be run beat the hell out of all the functionality that dovecot provides and validate the input/output against what is expected. It's a black-box style of testing, but it would help indicate any potential problems. It was through my own version of this that I found there are some limitations to how many UIDS I can transmit at one time. But who expects >10,000 UIDS in a single call?
Between running IMAP calls to localhost and inspecting the local filesystem directly, I suspect a really nice test suite could be developed. Interestingly, most of it could apply to more than just dovecot if you seperate testing for IMAP/Maildir standard formats from dovecot particulars (like indexing?).