Quoting torsten@???:
> IMO there should be tons of people in need for something like that.
> Basically everyone in a corporate firewall / http proxy environment who
> would still like to use a reasonable MUA instead of webmail. But I guess
Sure, but most sysadmins wouldn't want their users to use some email
client get mail from the outside without central malware scanning. A
person with some experience could create a tunnel trough the proxy, but
such a person usually knows what he's doing, in contrast to a user which
simply has to enter the proxy address (if not given by the system config).
> Of course if's kind of a chicken and egg problem. The server service
> doesn't make sense if you don't have clients that support the protocol and
Wouldn't it make more sense to do this in a proxy gateway, which talks
to the real smtp/imap servers, instead of implementing lots of code into
every mail server software?
> Are you saying that IMAP has extensions in place / under development that
> would allow me to *send* an email through IMAP rather than an SMTP server?
http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/smap.html
As with many extensions, it is not widely used (I don't know of any
software besides Courier itself and the corresponding client Cone that
supports it).
> Wouldn't that obsolete an SMTP server as as Exim sooner or later?
Courier itself has already a MTA.
A simple IMAP server implementation would hand over the submitted
message to the local MTA. So, no, MTAs are still needed and they do much
more than only being a smarthost. This would be more or less a
replacement for the submission/msa protocol. Inter-MTA traffic will most
probably never use something like SMAP.
