[sclug] IMAP server

[David Given]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 16:28, Dickon Hood wrote:
[...]
> My main complaint about IMAP is that it's hideous; it's remarkably hard to
> talk.  University of Washington.  Ick.  And I thoroughly endorse the
> comments from others here about avoiding uw-imapd; I run Dovecot myself.

Just *parsing* IMAP is hideously non-trivial --- the grammar's a pig, and is 
full of horrible context-sensitive keywords which means that the tokeniser 
has to be aware of what the parser's doing. I'm not well up on parser theory, 
but I think that it just can't be done with a LL(1) parser.

Plus the protocol's so, so, so *fussy* that you end up with lots of weird 
interactions between implementations. One particular server might work well 
with Thunderbird but suck with kmail; another server might be unusably slow 
with mutt, blazingly fast with pine, and cause Outlook Express to fall over 
(which admittedly isn't hard).

That said, I've had good experiences with dovecot and Thunderbird/kmail. It 
just seems to Just Work, which is what's supposed to happen.

(Has anyone produced a WebDAV-based mailstore yet?)

-- 
"Curses! Foiled by the chilled dairy treats of righteousness!" --- Earthworm 
Jim (evil)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.tmdg.co.uk/pipermail/sclug/attachments/20050710/f4e66d04/attachment.bin