Dear list,
I am looking for providers of free e-mail addresses known to run Dovecot (or a variant thereof) for IMAP access. I need only a few MB storage space and no particular features beyond SMTP and IMAP.
The reason I ask is that Dovecot is known to implement the IMAP spec quite respectfully, and I am writing a software which uses IMAP search (so I would suggest my users to register an e-mail to a provider implementing correctly the IMAP Search specifications, to reduce the probability of bugs). (More details here: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1821627.)
Do you know of any such provider?
Olivier
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 04:30:21PM +0200, Olivier Cailloux wrote:
I am looking for providers of free e-mail addresses known to run Dovecot (or a variant thereof) for IMAP access.
Possibly Posteo. Not free IIRC, but very inexpensive (~1EUR/month).
-- A: When it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: When is top-posting a bad thing?
() ASCII ribbon campaign. Please avoid HTML emails & proprietary /\ file formats. (Why? See e.g. https://v.gd/jrmGbS ). Thank you.
I am looking for providers of free e-mail addresses known to run Dovecot (or a variant thereof) for IMAP access.
Possibly Posteo. Not free IIRC, but very inexpensive (~1EUR/month).
I already offered him a free account to test with, and some GB's of testing mail. But him seem to have disappeared already ;)
Le dimanche 27 septembre 2020 à 16:30 +0200, Olivier Cailloux a écrit :
Dear list,
I am looking for providers of free e-mail addresses known to run Dovecot (or a variant thereof) for IMAP access. I need only a few MB storage space and no particular features beyond SMTP and IMAP.
The reason I ask is that Dovecot is known to implement the IMAP spec quite respectfully, and I am writing a software which uses IMAP search (so I would suggest my users to register an e-mail to a provider implementing correctly the IMAP Search specifications, to reduce the probability of bugs). (More details here: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1821627 .)
Do you know of any such provider?
Thanks to those who responded, offering me access to their servers. (I am sorry, it seems that I can’t reply to these answers individually when they are not in my inbox; something I had not realized initially, having not used mailing lists since long.)
These private offers are very kind, but my question was more about finding a provider who offers this access as a normal service, not as some special favor to me. That’s because I want to recommend this provider to the users of a software I am developing. And I do not expect my users will agree to pay some fee (even a low fee) to register for an e-mail address just to use my software, so I’d recommend only a provider who gives starter plans for free. (Of course these users in turn would perhaps then upgrade their plan if they want to.)
So far I didn’t find a service provider providing free e-mail accounts (similar to GMail, Yahoo, …) and using Dovecot, which I find very surprising, as I thought some of these big names, or at least some smaller ones that I do not know, would use Dovecot.
Thanks again for the replies, anyway.
Olivier
Le dimanche 27 septembre 2020 à 16:30 +0200, Olivier Cailloux a écrit :
Dear list,
I am looking for providers of free e-mail addresses known to run Dovecot (or a variant thereof) for IMAP access. I need only a few MB storage space and no particular features beyond SMTP and IMAP.
The reason I ask is that Dovecot is known to implement the IMAP spec quite respectfully, and I am writing a software which uses IMAP search (so I would suggest my users to register an e-mail to a provider implementing correctly the IMAP Search specifications, to reduce the probability of bugs). (More details here: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1821627 .)
These private offers are very kind, but my question was more about finding a provider who offers this access as a normal service, not as some special favor to me. That’s because I want to recommend this provider to the users of a software I am developing. And I do not expect my users will agree to pay some fee (even a low fee) to
register
There is no such thing as free. If you do not pay anything, you know you are the product.
for an e-mail address just to use my software, so I’d recommend only a provider who gives starter plans for free. (Of course these users in turn would perhaps then upgrade their plan if they want to.)
I don't think providers would be very willing (understatement) to install your software on their platform that services their other clients. I assume this is server side, since you enquire about dovecot.
So far I didn’t find a service provider providing free e-mail accounts (similar to GMail, Yahoo, …) and using Dovecot, which I find very surprising, as I thought some of these big names, or at least some smaller ones that I do not know, would use Dovecot.
T-mobile uses dovecot, find t-mobile users ;)
Le jeudi 08 octobre 2020 à 21:41 +0200, Marc Roos a écrit :
There is no such thing as free. If you do not pay anything, you know you are the product.
I do not wish to debate here about whether anything is really free in this world and what this would mean exactly, but I expect people understand what I mean in this context when I refer to a “free e-mail account”. Similarly, if you mean that it is a bad idea on my part to suggest to my users to open a free e-mail account, well, you may be right, but I currently don’t think so, and what I know for sure is that this is a long and complicated debate that I’d rather not have here and now.
for an e-mail address just to use my software, so I’d recommend only a provider who gives starter plans for free. (Of course these users in turn would perhaps then upgrade their plan if they want to.)
I don't think providers would be very willing (understatement) to install your software on their platform that services their other clients. I assume this is server side, since you enquire about dovecot.
My software acts as an IMAP client. I do not expect providers to install anything for me, I just want to find a provider that uses dovecot and offers e-mail accounts for free. For example, one answer to my question would be: “GMail offers e-mail accounts for free and uses dovecot”. (This would not be true, as GMail does not use dovecot, but if the statement would be true, it would correctly answer my question.) I would then be able to recommend my users to open an e-mail account at GMail, if they do not have one already, and they would then be able to use my software with their GMail account.
So far I didn’t find a service provider providing free e-mail accounts (similar to GMail, Yahoo, …) and using Dovecot, which I find very surprising, as I thought some of these big names, or at least some smaller ones that I do not know, would use Dovecot.
T-mobile uses dovecot, find t-mobile users ;)
My question is really: are there providers out there that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts (similar to Yahoo, GMail, and so on) b) use dovecot as their IMAP software.
Also, information that would point to a non-existence result would be of interest. For example, an article that indicates which softwares the main providers (that offer e-mail accounts for free) use.
The real, “final” question I am interested in is, but which might be slightly off-topic on this list (the reason I asked the other question), is to find providers that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
That is because my client uses the IMAP SEARCH feature, and it is usually implemented incorrectly (e.g. in GMail or MS Exchange).
Olivier
On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 10:15:10AM +0200, Olivier Cailloux wrote:
The real, “final” question I am interested in is, but which might be slightly off-topic on this list (the reason I asked the other question), is to find providers that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
IMO this is the right question to ask, even here.
That is because my client uses the IMAP SEARCH feature, and it is usually implemented incorrectly (e.g. in GMail or MS Exchange).
Probably it would be more informative to describe which features you need that are implemented "incorrectly".
Reality check: RFCs are not government-enforced standards. There are many sensible RFCs that never got implemented widely, or nearly at all, are implemented partially, or there are widely deployed not-fully-compliant software systems. If your client software requires a feature that's not widely available, you're just limiting your audience.
You may try to find a different way to achieve your goal using the features that are widely implemented. Real, successful software packages very often contain options to do some quirks in order to stay interoperable with existing noncompliant implementations.
-- Piotr "Malgond" Auksztulewicz firstname@lastname.net
Le vendredi 09 octobre 2020 à 11:22 +0200, Piotr Auksztulewicz a écrit :
On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 10:15:10AM +0200, Olivier Cailloux wrote:
The real, “final” question I am interested in is, but which might be slightly off-topic on this list (the reason I asked the other question), is to find providers that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
IMO this is the right question to ask, even here.
You are probably right, in retrospect, I should have started with that question.
That is because my client uses the IMAP SEARCH feature, and it is usually implemented incorrectly (e.g. in GMail or MS Exchange).
Probably it would be more informative to describe which features you need that are implemented "incorrectly".
Well, support of the IMAP SEARCH command is the specific feature I need. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4.
Reality check: RFCs are not government-enforced standards. There are many sensible RFCs that never got implemented widely, or nearly at all, are implemented partially, or there are widely deployed not-fully-compliant software systems. If your client software requires a feature that's not widely available, you're just limiting your audience.
Sad but true, I believe you are completely right. I will perhaps have to abandon my hope of finding compliant providers.
You may try to find a different way to achieve your goal using the features that are widely implemented. Real, successful software packages very often contain options to do some quirks in order to stay interoperable with existing noncompliant implementations.
This is precisely the problem in my case: it is impossible to work nicely around the lack of IMAP SEARCH feature on the side of my software, which is client-side, because that support must be provided server side. In a nutshell, the SEARCH command lets a client ask a server: “give me all e-mails whose subject and date match such and such criteria”. As a client, if the server does not implement IMAP SEARCH, I simply can’t know which e-mails match such and such criteria, short of downloading all e-mail headers and filtering them, which is orders of magnitude slower if my user has many e-mails in her box.
Admittedly, I can work around this more or less nicely, e.g. by downloading all headers once, storing them on the device of my user, and searching this local database, instead of re-downloading all headers every time my software runs. (This is how Thunderbird, and, I suppose, most MUAs out there, work.) But this creates other inconvenience for the user: this database takes space, takes time and bandwidth to build, has to be re-built when the user changes device, there is a security issue with having these e-mail headers stored locally; not talking about the fact that it will make my software much more complex for a single feature that really should, conceptually, be implemented server side. Hence my willingness to actively try to find compliant providers before giving up.
An alternative is to try to understand what exactly bugs in the implementation of IMAP SEARCH of each of the main providers out there (GMail; MS Exchange; and so on) and work around this on a case-by-case basis. I suppose this has been investigated already by some developers; if anybody knows where I could ask about this, I’d be very happy to ask there, as I guess this discussion is becoming completely OT for this list.
But the general lack of support for remote search in well known softwares such as Thunderbird (that seem to systematically perform searches client-side, on the local database) makes me rather pessimistic about the possibility of working around those bugs; after all, if the server sometimes (or often) replies incorrectly, as my tests indicate, there may be nothing the client can do to guess what the right answer is.
Olivier
On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 04:31:07PM +0200, Olivier Cailloux wrote:
Le vendredi 09 octobre 2020 à 11:22 +0200, Piotr Auksztulewicz a écrit :
On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 10:15:10AM +0200, Olivier Cailloux wrote:
The real, “final” question I am interested in is, but which might be slightly off-topic on this list (the reason I asked the other question), is to find providers that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
IMO this is the right question to ask, even here.
You are probably right, in retrospect, I should have started with that question.
That is because my client uses the IMAP SEARCH feature, and it is usually implemented incorrectly (e.g. in GMail or MS Exchange).
Probably it would be more informative to describe which features you need that are implemented "incorrectly".
Well, support of the IMAP SEARCH command is the specific feature I need. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4.
Reality check: RFCs are not government-enforced standards. There are many sensible RFCs that never got implemented widely, or nearly at all, are implemented partially, or there are widely deployed not-fully-compliant software systems. If your client software requires a feature that's not widely available, you're just limiting your audience.
Sad but true, I believe you are completely right. I will perhaps have to abandon my hope of finding compliant providers.
You may try to find a different way to achieve your goal using the features that are widely implemented. Real, successful software packages very often contain options to do some quirks in order to stay interoperable with existing noncompliant implementations.
This is precisely the problem in my case: it is impossible to work nicely around the lack of IMAP SEARCH feature on the side of my software, which is client-side, because that support must be provided server side. In a nutshell, the SEARCH command lets a client ask a server: “give me all e-mails whose subject and date match such and such criteria”. As a client, if the server does not implement IMAP SEARCH, I simply can’t know which e-mails match such and such criteria, short of downloading all e-mail headers and filtering them, which is orders of magnitude slower if my user has many e-mails in her box.
Admittedly, I can work around this more or less nicely, e.g. by downloading all headers once, storing them on the device of my user, and searching this local database, instead of re-downloading all headers every time my software runs. (This is how Thunderbird, and, I suppose, most MUAs out there, work.) But this creates other inconvenience for the user: this database takes space, takes time and bandwidth to build, has to be re-built when the user changes device, there is a security issue with having these e-mail headers stored locally; not talking about the fact that it will make my software much more complex for a single feature that really should, conceptually, be implemented server side. Hence my willingness to actively try to find compliant providers before giving up.
An alternative is to try to understand what exactly bugs in the implementation of IMAP SEARCH of each of the main providers out there (GMail; MS Exchange; and so on) and work around this on a case-by-case basis. I suppose this has been investigated already by some developers; if anybody knows where I could ask about this, I’d be very happy to ask there, as I guess this discussion is becoming completely OT for this list.
But the general lack of support for remote search in well known softwares such as Thunderbird (that seem to systematically perform searches client-side, on the local database) makes me rather pessimistic about the possibility of working around those bugs; after all, if the server sometimes (or often) replies incorrectly, as my tests indicate, there may be nothing the client can do to guess what the right answer is.
Olivier
Some projects just can't get around the lack of compliance from vendors, whether it's from incompetence or their not needing/desiring to do it.
Several years ago, I wanted to move lpd forward. After weeks of looking at the hardware with non-compliance, I finally just had to drop the project because it was truly a vast and hopeless situation. It was an excellent, but frustrating lesson.
I wish you luck, but you might be in the same spot I found myself.
Chris Bennett
On 09 Oct 2020, at 02:15, Olivier Cailloux <olivier.cailloux@dauphine.fr> wrote:
My question is really: are there providers out there that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts (similar to Yahoo, GMail, and so on)
Doubtful, and if so I don't know any.
b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
I believe this is achievable via Roundcube and some plugins (managesieve come to mind). Possibly Horde also supports sieve via plugins.
Setting up either webmail client is pretty trivial.
-- Everybody wants a rock to wrap a piece of string around
Le samedi 10 octobre 2020 à 03:31 -0600, @lbutlr a écrit :
On 09 Oct 2020, at 02:15, Olivier Cailloux < olivier.cailloux@dauphine.fr
wrote: My question is really: are there providers out there that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts (similar to Yahoo, GMail, and so on)
Doubtful, and if so I don't know any.
b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
I believe this is achievable via Roundcube and some plugins (managesieve come to mind). Possibly Horde also supports sieve via plugins.
Setting up either webmail client is pretty trivial.
Thank you for your reply. But I am not sure that we are on the same page here. I do not see how I can set this up so as to provide users of my software with such a functionality. The software I develop is a client software. I do not want to run a server and provide a service. I want to provide a client software that uses the e-mail service of existing providers.
Olivier
On 10 Oct 2020, at 08:35, Olivier Cailloux <olivier.cailloux@dauphine.fr> wrote:
Le samedi 10 octobre 2020 à 03:31 -0600, @lbutlr a écrit :
On 09 Oct 2020, at 02:15, Olivier Cailloux < olivier.cailloux@dauphine.fr
wrote: My question is really: are there providers out there that satisfy these two conditions: a) offer free e-mail accounts (similar to Yahoo, GMail, and so on)
Doubtful, and if so I don't know any.
b) implement correctly the IMAP SEARCH feature of RFC 3501.
I believe this is achievable via Roundcube and some plugins (managesieve come to mind). Possibly Horde also supports sieve via plugins.
Setting up either webmail client is pretty trivial.
Thank you for your reply. But I am not sure that we are on the same page here. I do not see how I can set this up so as to provide users of my software with such a functionality. The software I develop is a client software. I do not want to run a server and provide a service. I want to provide a client software that uses the e-mail service of existing providers.
OK, then I am not sure it is possible. Some providers support limited SIEVE features, but the only ones I have seen support it only though editing rules via a web interface that only allows a very small subset of what sieve can do. Without coordinating with those providers, it's unlikely you will be able to get anything to work.
Isn't the whole point of sieve that it is server-side filtering and rules? So you need to be able to write the sieve files to the appropriate location which, unless someone is truly mad, is going to be outside the IMAP store where a client cannot simply write a sieve file.
-- "You can think and you can fight, but the world's always movin', and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance."
On 7. Oct 2020, at 17.35, Olivier Cailloux <olivier.cailloux@dauphine.fr> wrote:
So far I didn’t find a service provider providing free e-mail accounts (similar to GMail, Yahoo, …) and using Dovecot, which I find very surprising, as I thought some of these big names, or at least some smaller ones that I do not know, would use Dovecot.
There is always mailbox.org <http://mailbox.org/> available that runs on dovecot. Not free, but 1€/month is not far from that.
Sami
participants (7)
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＠lbutlr
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Chris Bennett
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Marc Roos
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Olivier Cailloux
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Piotr Auksztulewicz
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Sam Kuper
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Sami Ketola