[Dovecot] Stateful Webmail

[Ed W]

Michael Carter wrote:
> Coincidentally, we have just began work on a JavaScript IMAP client. With
> it, building a webmail app should be *entirely* a UI concern. The good news
> is that our Socket interface is very stable and is being used in production
> for protocols like IRC for webchat. The bad news is that none of the the
> Orbited developers have experience with the IMAP protocol.
>   


One leg up is to run the Dovecot imap command tracer and point a 
selection of normal clients at it and watch the commands they use.  You 
don't need to support a full IMAP implementation, only the bits which 
are required to make your app work

However, most existing clients are somewhat inefficient in their use of 
Javascript so I would suggest that you build a higher level abstraction 
like "refresh message id list" and then run the IMAP commands past some 
experts (Timo?) in case someone has some suggestions on more efficient 
ways to achieve the same effect

Note that Timo has done some work on the LEMONADE extensions and it may 
be that these will facilitate a more efficient and responsive protocol?

 From my own experience I would also suggest that you blindly compress 
the TCP stream in both direction (gzip or similar is good enough).  My 
experience is that the compression is a win in most situations up to 
40-100Mbit kind of connection speeds (ie higher than most internet 
connections)

Good luck

Ed W