Re: imap4d - feature request :-)

[Nic Ferrier]

Sam Roberts <address@hidden> writes:
>  
> > It is multi-process though but I wouldn't call it overkill. However, 
> > I'd prefer something thread based which is why I want to add maildir 
> > support to this project. 
>  
> What do you mean by thread based? 

Sorry, that was a bit terse wasn't it?

I want an imap server that uses threads instead of deamons. The
GNU-mailutils imapd could be adapted very easily to do that.


You might say "but that's mad, there's no reason for that" but let
me explain a bit where I'm coming from:

I'm working on a new free product. The product will include IMAP
accounts, a webmail tool and a mail domain for each client. I'm not
going to charge very much for the service and therefore I'm going to
run it on gnu/linux boxes and I want to get the maximum load from
each box.

If I have a thread based imapd then 2 things are facilitated:

1. I can use IBM's pth library to improve thread->process mapping
2. I can have the imapd provide an efficient pool of connections for
the webmail tool.


The second point needs more explanation: as you will know, you can't
logout of IMAP without dropping the connection. That means that a
webmail tool must have one connection per user and must either drop
and re-create the connections a lot, or try and maintain the
connection for the life of the http session (which is tricky because
people do funny things with webmail tools).

However, if the imapd offered a special mode to the webmail tool, a
mode where logout did not drop the connection, then the webmail tool
could simply create 20 (or whatever) imap connections and multiplex
these over the incomming http requests (instead of the current http
sessions).

This is something I played with whilst I was designing BT's webmail
stuff, unfortunately there wasn't a free imap server with the right
architecture.


Anyway, that's a bit long winded, but you get where I'm coming
from. 

Maildir is important to me btw, to avoid locking the mailboxes. I'm
going to have exim deliver the mail, through an imap transport.


Nic