IMAP server [was: Q: V2 format]

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

"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).