So you want to hack on IMAP…
(Last IMAP themed post for a while, I promise!)
Well, first off, you’re horribly misinformed: you do not actually want to hack on IMAP. But supposing, for some masochistic reason, you need to dig in the guts of your mail synchronizer and fix a bug or add some features. There are a few useful things to know before you start your journey...
- Read your RFCs. RFC 3501 is the actual specification, while RFC 2683 gives a lot of helpful tips for working around the hairy bits of the many IMAP servers out there in practice. You should also know about the UIDPLUS extension, RFC 4315, which is fairly well supported and makes a client implementor’s life a lot easier.
- IMAP is fortunately a text-based protocol, so you can and should play around with it on the command line. A great tool to use for this is imtest, which has all sorts of fancy features such as SASL authentication. (Don’t forget to rlwrap it!) Make sure you prefix your commands with an identifier (UID is a valid identifier, so typing UID FETCH ... will not do what you want.)
- It is generally a better idea to use UIDs over sequence numbers, since they are more stable, but be careful: as per the specification, UID prefixed commands never fail, so you will need to check untagged data in the response to see if anything actually happened. (If you have a shitty IMAP library, it may not clear out untagged data between requests, so watch out for stale data!) Oh, and look up UIDVALIDITY.
- There exist a lot of software that interfaces with IMAP, all of which has accreted special cases for buggy IMAP servers over the years. It is well worth sourcediving a few to get a sense for what kinds of things you will need to handle.