				Mail::IMAPClient 

COPYRIGHT

                       Copyright 1999, The Kernen Group, Inc.
                            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 versio n 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 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 Socket.pm and IO::Socket.pm. 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)

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. 

DEPENDENCIES

The Mail::IMAPClient module uses the IO::Socket module to make a socket 
connection to an IMAP server and the Socket module to get some constants. 

You can verify that your system has a sufficient perl installation by 
entering on the command line:

perl -e 'use Socket; use IO::Socket;'

If you get compile errors then you'll have trouble using 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 funtion 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.
David.Kernen@erols.com

