[Dovecot] Webmail app ... again.

[Sean Kamath]

On Aug 13, 2008, at 4:03 PM, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:

> Daniel L. Miller wrote:
>> Geert Hendrickx wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 04:37:11PM -0400, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>>>
>>>> One thing that would be nice, that pretty much no webmail does,  
>>>> is to
>>>> keep a stateful connection open all the time (or at least some of  
>>>> the
>>>> time) instead of creating tons of short-lived connections that  
>>>> ask the
>>>> same stuff over and over again. With a stateful connection you  
>>>> could
>>>> basically run IDLE and wait for changes there instead of asking  
>>>> all  the
>>>> time "is there new mail?" "is there new mail now?" "what about   
>>>> now?".
>>>>
>> I'm sure "native" support would be better, but how is this  
>> different from using Squirrelmail with IMAPProxy?
>
> Very interesting.  I was thinking of hos to do something similar to  
> IMAPProxy.  Now I may not have to reinvent that wheel.

Seems to me you could use something like mod_perl to have state- 
keeping processes running that can keep the connections alive, going  
IDLE after 10 seconds or so after the last request they got.  You can  
limit the number of open connections from any given process with LRU  
queuing, but I don't have suggestions on how to tie which process gets  
which request.  Perhaps by writing a middle-layer service that all the  
processes talk to?

But the big killer is scaleability and handling multiple servers,  
which is why some sort of front end like IMAPProxy are attractive.

Good luck

Sean