[PLUG] IMAP: Using and Administration

[Wil Cooley]

On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 12:47 -0700, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
> Anyone know of a good article, paper or book on IMAP.  Not just how to 
> set it up on a server or how to configure a mail client to use IMAP but 
> somethnig explains the really neat features and how to use them.
> 
> Some I'm kind-of aware of are: shared folders (well actually mailboxes 
> in IMAP terms), server administrators that can create/modify users and 
> access their mailboxes/folders without having their password.

There's an old O'Reilly book about it. The chapters on Cyrus are old.
Reading the cyrus-users list and documentation helps, as does reading
the RFCs, which I needed to do for some of my scripts.

> I've seen references to these capabilities in reading the RFCs and 
> looking at modules on CPAN.
> 
> I think some of this is tied to how the IMAP server (software) is built.

Indeed. There is a variety of optional IMAP features and not every
client and server implements all of them.

> I am creating an application that needs to inventory a users IMAP 
> mailboxes and create a report for them.  Fortunately the software I'm 
> writing this for stores users passwords in plain text in a database I 
> have access to but that may go away in a future version.

You might find some examples in the couple of little scripts that I've
written:

http://haus.nakedape.cc/svn/public/trunk/small-projects/mail-utils/

Are you looking for a way around having to store the user's passwords?
You can use proxy authentication, where you authenticate as an
administrator and be authorized as a user. The IMAP server
implementation needs to support it; Cyrus does, I know. I have not
actually used it, however.