Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Steve Luzynski <sluzynsk sound net>]

On Sun, 18 Apr 1999 13:55:11 Ronald de Man wrote:
> I'm talking about corporate mailservers that have been set up to
> offer some twisted version of IMAP. Maybe Exchange can also export
> regular IMAP, but that's not of much help for the common employee.
> 
> Or am I missing something here...
> 
> I've been trying to find out why I couldn't get netscape to read my mail
> at work. Telnetting into port 143 and following a specification of the
> IMAP protocol I got stuck at the point where I had to authenticate
> myself.. the AUTHENTICATE command needs to specify a protocol, for
> example KERBEROS_V4, but I could find nothing that worked... so I suppose
> that's where netscape got stuck as well, and where Microsoft's 'extensions'
> came in.

Actually, your admin just hasn't set things up properly. I admin a large
Exchange installation as part of my 'real' job, and I can read my email from
Linux Netscape quite handily. As well as access public folders and the
corporate address book via LDAP. Of course, I had personal reasons to want
such things to work properly. :)

If you can talk your admin into setting things up and (s)he just doesn't
know how, have them contact me at work at postmaster@utilicorp.com. 

*****This offer of Exchange help only to further the cause of Linux at work,
I do NOT have time for other questions. Questions unrelated to the setup of
IMAP and LDAP for *internal* use (i.e., no security considerations)
will be politely forwarded on to more traditional support 
avenues.******

That said, I still think that if we can all agree that pluggable 
protocol modules would be a Good Thing(TM), then once the base framework
is in place we can start playing with a MAPI module. I have a sneaky feeling
that it will be a serious bear to write and would hate to have it slow down
development of the base program. Microsoft's *documented* interfaces are a bit
different from what they actually use, and are written around a particularly
nasty version of COM besides.