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

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

Sorry to just jump into an old thread; I was wondering about IMAP server
support as well, in particular because unlike NNTP that allows pushing
the search to the server, and that would be useful for local archives.

> 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.

I'm not really sure that's true; dovecot, for example, provides their
lists archives via anonymous IMAP:
https://www.dovecot.org/mailinglists.html

They have instructions here on how to do that over dovecot:
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/ReadOnlyArchive

In particular:

   /var/home/anonymous/control# ls -la
   drwxr-xr-x 3 root     root     4096 May 25 15:43 ./
   drwxr-xr-x 3 anondove root     4096 Mar 20 14:39 .imap/
   -rw-r--r-- 1 root     root   33 May 25 15:43 .subscriptions

   Create the .subscriptions file manually to contain all the mailboxes
   you. Note that the control directory isn't writable by anondove, so
   that the subscriptions can't be changed.

   [...]

 *    INBOX must always exists even if it's empty. Make sure it's not
      writable.
 * Make sure the mail directory isn't writable so users can't create new
      mailboxes.
 * The mboxes can be placed in the directory itself, or symlinks can be
      used. Above you'll see that mailman places all Dovecot archives under
      /var/home/archives. Make sure none of these files are writable by
      anondove.

They also set up some read-only ACLs, I think to make the read-only
state clear to the user agent, but of course a public-inbox IMAP server
can hard-code all of this and not accept any write commands to start
with.

Anyway, just FYI; since I don't know perl at all I don't think I'll be
doing any work on this.

johannes