[imp] Direct Maildir Access

[Greg Swift]

Michael M Slusarz wrote:
> 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).
well, as I said, there is already a fairly thorough library of maildir 
access for php to access in the sqwebmail package.
> 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).
>   
Well it can't do everything via IMAP considering there is POP access 
configurable instead of IMAP, yes?

And anyways, the maildir access included in sqwebmail seems to be a kind 
of cli level access to behave as if it is an IMAP server.  In this way 
it does not break anything necessary to IMAP.  One of the benefits on 
being created and probably sharing code with the IMAP server.  Yes, it 
would require some abstraction in the code, but only an extension of 
what should already be there to provide POP and IMAP access.

-greg