[Dovecot] Sending email over IMAP?

[Kenneth Porter]

On Thursday, May 04, 2006 4:34 PM -0400 Charles Marcus 
<CMarcus at Media-Brokers.com> wrote:

>> If one uses a remote sent folder, these two operations are one.
>
> Eh? Not in my experience, they aren't - although I have thought to myself
> many times that they SHOULD be.
>
> Thunderbird is notorious for being able to successfully send a message,
> but failing on the 'Copy to Sent Folder'. When it fails, you have to quit
> restart TBird before it will start working again.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant that the proposed single IMAP operation 
replaces two distinct operations, one IMAP and one SMTP, from the client's 
perspective. Once the message is accepted by the IMAP server, it's 
effectively queued for any downstream delivery operation.

Presumably this acceptance isn't to the "Sent" folder but to some 
intermediate folder representing the output queue. Or it's to the Sent 
folder but with some kind of queue-pending flag that's cleared once the 
message is successfully handed off to the MTA. The SMAP extension appears 
to implement the latter design. This requires some kind of queue-runner 
process to periodically retry failed transmissions.