Mail::IMAPClient 

Copyright 1999-2003 The Kernen Group, Inc.
Copyright 2007 Mark Overmeer
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 version 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 paragraph has not been updated for many years]
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)

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. Mark Bush's Authen::NTLM module can assist with
this if you specifically are interested in NTLM authentication.

REPORING BUGS

See http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Mail-IMAPClient

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.
DJKERNEN@cpan.org