Mail::IMAPClient COPYRIGHT Copyright 1999, 2000 The Kernen Group, Inc. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: a) the "Artistic License" which comes with this Kit, or b) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either versio n 1, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See either the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details. DESCRIPTION This module provides perl routines that simplify a sockets connection to and an IMAP conversation with an IMAP server. COMPATIBILITY This module was developed on Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 against Netscape IMAP servers versions 3.6 and 4.1. However, since it is written in perl and designed for flexibility, it should run on any OS with a TCP/IP stack and a version of perl that includes the Socket and IO::Socket modules. It also should be able to talk to any IMAP server, even those that have, um, proprietary features (assuming that the programmer knows what those features are). To date, I know that the test suite runs successfully with the following IMAP servers: -Netscape Messenging Server v4.x -Netscape Messenging Server v3.x -UW-IMAP (I think it was 4.5) -Cyrus IMAP4 v1.5.19 -Mirapoint Message Server Appliances (OS versions 1.6.1, 1.7.1, and 2.0.2) I also know that it has some problems running against the InterMail server vM.4.001.02.00 (and probably other versions of InterMail as well). Version 2.0.3 has been tested with the mdaemon server with mixed results. It seems that mdaemon does not comply strictly with RFC2060 and so you may have problems using this module with mdaemon, especially with folder names with embedded spaces or embedded double quotes. You may be able to get some simple tasks to work but you won't be able to run the test suite successfully. Use with caution. If your server requires the use of the AUTHENTICATE IMAP client command (say, for strong authentication) then you can still use this module, provided you can come up with the appropriate responses to any challenges offered by your server. DEPENDENCIES The Mail::IMAPClient module uses the IO::Socket module to make a socket connection to an IMAP server and the Socket module to get some constants. It also uses Fcntl (for faster I/O) and IO::Select, IO::File, Data::Dumper, and Carp. You can verify that your system has a sufficient perl installation by entering on the command line: perl -e 'use Socket; use IO::Socket; use IO::File; use IO::Select; use Fcntl; use Carp; use Data::Dumper;' If you get compile errors then you'll have trouble using Mail::IMAPClient. REPORING BUGS See the section on "REPORTING BUGS" in the module's documentation if you are having problems. YOU MUST FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THE DOCUMENTATION AND PROVIDE ALL OF THE NECESSARY INFORMATION if you expect a response from your bug report. You should also look at the data you gather before you send it, since doing so will often solve your problem. INSTALLATION Generally, gunzipping and untarring the source file, running 'perl Makefile.PL' and 'make install' are all it takes to install this module. And if that's too much work you can always use the CPAN module! ;-) OVERVIEW OF FUNCTIONALITY Mail::IMAPClient.pm provides methods to simplify the connection to and the conversation between a perl script and an IMAP server. Virtually all IMAP Client commands (as defined in rfc2060) are supported, either through IMAPClient object methods or the 'default method', which is an AUTOLOAD hack that assumes a default syntax for IMAP Client commands of: tagvalue COMMAND [Arg1 [Arg2 [... Arg3]]]" By remarkable coincidence, AUTOLOAD's default syntax mimics the general syntax of IMAP Client commands. This means that if a script tries to use any undefined method then that method will be interpreted as an unimplemented IMAP command, and the default syntax will be used to create the command string. I did this as a short cut to writing a bunch of methods that were practically the same. There are inheritance implications because of this approach but as far as I can tell this is not a serious limitation. However, if you decide to write modules that inherit from this class that require AUTOLOAD logic of their own then you will have to take the Mail::IMAPClient's AUTOLOAD strategy into account. Where methods are defined, they usually exist to add functionality, perhaps by massaging output or by supplying default arguments. An example is the search method, which accepts the same arguments as the SEARCH IMAP Client command (as documented in RFC2060) but which massages the results so that the return value is an array of message sequence numbers matching the search criteria, rather than a line of text listing the sequence numbers. Some methods exists solely to add functionality, such as the folders method, which invokes the list method but then massages the results to produce an array containing all folder names. The message_count and delete_messsage methods are similarly examples of methods that add function to "raw" IMAP Client commands. Further information is provided in the module's documentation, which you are encouraged to read and enjoy. Good Luck! Dave Kernen The Kernen Group, Inc. David.Kernen@erols.com