[dovecot] Re: bincimap

[Charlie Brady]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> Sorry, I just got a bit disappointed after reading the the web page first.
> Your lines of code comparisions just seemed to imply that your server does
> everything that others would but with only a fraction of code.

Well, it doesn't claim to support other than Maildir, but it does claim to 
be a full IMAP4rev1 implementation.

> When you write something from scratch, I think it's a good idea to design it
> so that it's superior to existing implementations in at least some ways

Are you suggesting that Andreas hasn't done this?

> just make a clone with slightly different coding style. If all you wanted
> was a clone with some changes (and better maintainer), forking the project
> would be much smaller job.

Who would want a clone of Courier IMAP? :-)

> Separating the pre-login process from post-login process would probably be a
> good idea to keep their functionality completely separated. It would also be
> easier to audit the pre-login code if you knew exactly what there is.
> After logging in, you could just exec() the post-login process.

Agreed. Given that qmail-pop3d was an inspiration, I'm surprised this 
hasn't been done.

You might look at http://www.untroubled.org/mailfront/imapfront.html for a 
pre-existing pre-login imapd. Doesn't handle STARTTLS though.

Timo, my preferred way to run network servers is to have tcpserver 
running under supervise, and logging to multilog. bincimap is designed to 
run this way. I don't know how dovecot executes - there's no mention of 
either init.d or inetd in the documentation AFAICT. Can dovecot be used in 
a supervise/tcpserver/multilog environment, and if so, how?

--
Charlie Brady 
Lead Product Developer
Network Server Solutions Group
Mitel Networks Corporation      http://www.mitel.com/smallbusiness
Phone: +1 (613) 592 5660 or 592 2122  Fax: +1 (613) 592 1175