Questions[imap](server)

After some searching I've come up totally empty handed on if there is any standard (or non-standard for that matter) specification or best practice for specifying the IMAP server for a domain name. I.e. if I have an account such as "[email protected]", and I wish to read my mail via IMAP, is there any DNS record which would indicate to my mail client which mail server it should be contacting? I've never seen anything like this, and virtually all email setup instructions I've seen include an exact host name for IMAP, e.g. "mail.example.com" or "imap.example.com". I guess the assumption is that the employees or other users of example.com can find out what server to use from their administrator. However if example.com were to have thousands of accounts, this would become burdensome. It would seem very useful to just enter your email address "[email protected]" and have it look up the IMAP server name in DNS based on the email's domain name (not dissimilar to how an MX record works for SMTP).

Anyone heard of anything like this?

I have an IMAP mail server and use Thunderbird as my client. I didn't understand the sychronization of client-server using IMAP vs POP. My IMAP server was filling up, so I logged onto the server and deleted the Inbox thinking that Thunderbird had local copies of the mail.

When I opened Thunderbird, it synched against the IMAP server and marked all my email as deleted. The emails still exist in the {path}/thunderbird/profile/default/INBOX file fortunately. After some research on the net, I edited that file and changed all the “X-Mozilla-Status:0001" to "“X-Mozilla-Status:0000".

When I brought Thunderbird back up, the emails were still gone. Does anyone know how to recover these?

I need a Unix-based tool, such as a shell script or command-line program, to copy IMAP folders from one server to another. Ideally, the tool should copy all the folders for a single account (Inbox, Sent, Trash, and user-created folders) at once, rather than one folder at a time. It should preserve message dates. As an option, I'd like to be able to copy just a single IMAP folder.

Alternatively, is there a tool to copy an mbox file to an IMAP server? I have direct access to the mbox files in the filesystem, but not to the filesystem of the remote IMAP server.

Edit: Is there a way for a user to migrate their own questions to Server Fault?

I am writing an application which reacts to emails sent to a mailbox. It retrieves the emails via IMAP. It will be deployed to a number of systems where I do not control the mail server configuration.

I would like to use IMAP flags to indicate which messages have been handled. Are the system flags sufficiently widely supported that I can reasonably depend on them in my application? Are user-defined flags sufficiently widely supported?

(If the answer is "ha ha, not a chance", then I shall use folders instead.)

Thanks

-Ben

Situation: mail server with IMAP only access. Problem: I want to be able to filter mails (put some mails to various folders, mark them as read and so on).

Most new email clients have this ability, but I want a standalone filtering program, as I need to use various email clients to connect to this server.

Generally - something like procmail, but working over IMAP.

The software will be run on Linux or Solaris.