[imp] Direct Maildir Access

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Greg Swift <gsml at netops.gvtc.com>:

> Based on my research the only webmail I've ever found that directly
> access maildir is sqwebmail, which looks horrible, and is not nearly as
> nice as horde, nor will it probably ever be.  As certain technologies
> move forwad (GFS and clustering specifically) I think it would be an
> amazing enhancement if there was a backend option of direct maildir
> instead of just accessing via POP and IMAP.  I realize that that layer
> adds some nice features and lessens some of the coding, but does anyone
> else think this would be a nice addition? Heck, I realize that sqwebmail
> accomplishes this by using a library of c code written to access the
> directory structure, which if you are not using virtual users means suid
> root, but with any large virtual users system, this  wouldnt be a big
> deal, and could probably be forked into a seperate lib and utilized.
>
> On that same note, where would one start if they wanted to add this?

You would either need to write a whole new PHP extension, or somehow  
get modify the c-client code to use a locate maildir reader driver (I  
have no idea whether the underlying c-client code even supports this  
kind of access - you may have to look around for patches to the UW  
source itself for this functionality).

> I
> may not be able to code it entirely myself, but I'm a fairly decent php
> programmer as well as sysadmin, but I have access to some coders, so
> that if it was a reasonable task I would gladly pursue it.

To write the access code in PHP would most likely not work (due to the  
privileges of the PHP server and the permissions on a user's mailbox)  
and even if you could overcome this problem, you would pretty much  
have to rewrite all of IMP's mail handling code to work with the new  
PHP class (since IMP uses the imap_* functions everywhere).

michael

_______________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at curecanti.org]