Re: IMAP server [was: Q: V2 format]

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> writes:

> "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>> > "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>> >> Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> writes:
>> > As far as personal mail goes, I wouldn't want serial numbers at all
>> > (more unnecessary state to keep track of).
>> 
>> At least imap requires serial numbers, and I imagine the easy transition
>> for mail clients is to have an imap server.  As you have mentioned an
>> ordered list of commits is good enough to reconstruct the msgnum
>> reliably so it is unlikely we would need to do anything special there.
>
> I would rather layer IMAP (and POP3) on top of NNTP than to tie
> it to any git/SQLite/Xapian parts in public-inbox.  We could
> ship it with public-inbox, of course; but I don't see why an
> IMAP or POP3 server could not work by using innd (or similar) as
> a backend.
>
> I don't think any design compromises need to be made to existing
> the git/SQLite/Xapian parts to support IMAP/POP3.
>
> Hosting an IMAP/POP3 server is way more overhead for the admin
> as it requires storing user credentials and storing per-reader
> state.  So the preference is to do NNTP as well as possible and
> layer the complexity of per-user account data on top of it.
>
> Right now, none of the NNTP/HTTP parts require write access
> to the machine it runs on aside from log files.
>
> Thus the goal is to promote NNTP usage as it's cheapest/easiest
> for the server admin; but to still have IMAP/POP3 as stopgaps
> (similar to the ssoma/mlmmj-replay script I use to allow SMTP
> subscriptions to this inbox).

That makes complete sense.  I definitely agree that NNTP should be what
is optimized for.

Eric