Re: IMAPS support

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 16 August 09:50 Carlos Morgado wrote:
> 
> On 2001.08.16 03:32:34 +0100 Manuel McLure wrote:
> > How difficult would it be to implement IMAPS support in Balsa? I can see
> > that libmutt seems to have support for it, but I haven't gone deeply enough
> > into the API to see how easy it would be to get Balsa to use IMAPS. If
> > someone can give me some pointers, I may look into implementing this.
> > 
> 
> i believe now is just a question of grunt work. the balsa func that encodes
> mutt mailbox names must be changed to accomodate imaps syntax but that's 
> about it (apart from the eventual GUI stuff). of course, there can be an
> ugly piece of code hidding somewhere ;)
> 
> when i started messing with TLS i noticed the certificates never verified,
> not sure why. that may need some work too, but i'll eventually get around to 
> that.

OpenSSL doesn't do this by default as I recall.  There is a good reason for
this but it escapes me at the moment.  This whole issue is one of the reasons
I've not done certificate handling for the STARTTLS extension in libESMTP yet.
This area is *very* difficult.  I'd suggest getting on one of one of
the OpenSSL mailing lists and trawling the archives first.  And get a good
book on SSL.  Don't do *anything* until you understand the issues surrounding
SSL/TLS and the X.509 certificate structures.  Then work out what the
objectives of having SSL/TLS actually are.  Then write the code.  This will take
a *lot* of time, believe me.  Even with all the code in place there is the
problems of certificate management etc. etc.

I realise I'm probably teaching you to suck eggs here but I've been down this
path before and struggled.

Frankly, I'd settle for just getting an encrypted connection to the IMAP server
and leave the more difficult issues of certificates, and trust till later.

Brian Stafford