[Dovecot] Capability problems dovecot 2.0

[reg9009]

Timo Sirainen schrieb:
>
>> For gathering the capabilities of plugins, etc. Would it be a viable
>> solution to demand the plugins to pass capabilities at the point where
>> the plugin registers/loads itself? That way it may not be that ugly?
>
> The problem is that Dovecot's IMAP code is split to pre-login and
> post-login processes. The pre-login processes don't load any plugins,
> only the post-login processes do. But the capability is needed in the
> pre-login process. So the way it works with v1.x is that when you
> start dovecot it'll execute the imap post-login binary with a
> "dump-capability" flag enabled, which basically loads the plugins and
> tells the current capability string to Dovecot master process. This
> has caused all kinds of problems in past and I'm sure as there will be
> more trouble with that in future.
>
> The alternative that I'm thinking right now is that in the pre-login
> process Dovecot would only advertise those capabilities that are
> actually useful before login. Then after login it would send an
> updated capability reply to the client. The important question here
> is: Are there any clients that don't update their capabilities? So far
> I've tested Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Alpine and they're fine with
> it. The most important question here is do Outlook and OE update that
> list? (Or does OE use any extensions anyway? Outlook uses IDLE anyway.)
>
>

Ok. Your suggestion makes sense. If you would do it that way, I'm happy
to test with different (Outlook, OE, etc.) clients to crosscheck if
they've got a problem with that and, if not, honor new capabilities.

Regards,
Sebastian