Xmail + Imap + Windows ?, Anyone is using it?

I'm searching a way to use IMAP together with XMail server and I'm under Windows. Does anyone know a solution?

Hello Peter2121 and everyone. I am looking for solution too... Now - not results.
May be someone will help us!!!

Use hmail Server to handle IMAP and stick with XMail for the sending task
or move completely to hmail

http://www.hmailserver.com/

Thank you. for help :^)

I've been trying to modify UW IMAP to work with XMail, but so far there are no usable results. It already authenticates against XMail, but the most important part, reading messages from inbox, is still missing, so it's quite useless. And although the inbox format is very simple, writing the required driver is not, at least for me. And even if I succeed, it still doesn't seem as something very usable with larger sites (no problem for me, I want it just for my small hobby site).

So the best hope is to wait for official support in XMail. I mean, according to this forum, it's in the making for at least about five years, so it must be out any day now.

Btw, AfterLogic has XMail with IMAP: http://www.afterlogic.com/products/xmail-server-pro. But only as paid version and something tells me, they won't be sharing the source with us.

An interesting project. They seem to use some IMAP server embedded into a DLL which is used by a modified XMail binary. Don't think that this is blessed by XMail's GPL ...

Concerning UW-IMAP: Maybe this will help ...
http://www.web4free.ch/xmail/downloads/xmail-imap.txt

According to my understanding of GPL (but I'm no expert and I can be wrong), the dll is the way how to keep the IMAP code private. They have to release the changes to XMail, but it would be only the code for loading the dll and calling some function(s) from it. The dll itself is in the same position as for example Microsoft's kernel32.dll. GPL program uses it, but if dll doesn't contain anything GPL, author can keep the code to himself.

About UW IMAP, the presented solution isn't very suitable for Windows. I already managed to find solution good enough for my needs, so I'll put together some nice howto soon. But anyone interested, do not get your hopes too high!

They should at least release such changes like multiple POP users etc. to the community. But it's not my cup of tea ...

How2: We are keen on every little contribution here, thanks in advance !

As promised...

Windows + XMail + UW IMAP + RoundCube HowTo

The following should be taken as information about what I did, rather than the way how it should be done properly. All I did was to reach my main goal, I may have omitted things needed for other use. For example I didn't even look at SSL yet.

Main goal:
Add IMAP to XMail, primarily for use with local RoundCube (http://www.roundcube.net) webmail on the same server.

Other requirements:
- POP3 must stay functional, mail must not be moved before user actually connects with IMAP

Description of changes:
I started with UW IMAP, because it is the only standalone open-source IMAP server I found, that cleanly compiles on Windows (without Cygwin).

The major change is for the authentication system. Original code worked with system accounts. Because XMail doesn't use them, I completely removed whole user-changing code. The new code authenticates users against XMail's mailusers.tab (in path taken from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GNU\XMail\MAIL_ROOT). This will probably be problem with larger sites, because it means reading this file over and over, not mentioning that XMail probably won't be very happy when it needs to write to that file while it is opened by imapd.

By doing that, I created a wonderful security hole. My code tries to make sure that user won't be able to access any file outside of his/her mail directory, but because I'm not very familiar with the whole UW IMAP code, I may have missed something! If you decide to use this, do not at least ever run it under system/admin account!

IMAP data are stored in MAIL_ROOT\domains\<domain>\<user>\imap\ (you have to create it first).

The biggest trouble was with Inbox. The proper way to handle it, would be to write a driver for XMail's mailbox format and access the message files directly. Unfortunately it was too much for me and therefore I ended up using POP3 access to XMail. The c-client library (part of UW IMAP) has native support for POP3, so it wasn't very hard that way.

There are two ways how to do it:

1) tell client to use special name for inbox

UW IMAP has special namespace (#move) that allows to automatically move messages from one folder to another. Combined with support for POP3, one can use something like this:

to move all messages from POP3 server at localhost (using the same username/password as for IMAP) into INBOX. Trouble with this approach is that no client supports it. No problem for me, because RoundCube is open-source too and it's only small change to add support for this.

2) handle it in imapd using special wrapper driver

In IMAP directory, create text file with extension "popbox" (e.g. INBOX.popbox) and put the connection string at first line, for example:

IMAP server will then present it as another IMAP folder (read and delete only, no writes). With some additional modifications, it would be possible to map any POP3 account as IMAP folder. Currently not, because there doesn't seem to be a way how to include password in connection string.
This approach also has some problems. First, the read and delete only access may be a problem. Second, it doesn't allow to set flags, so all messages are always "unread". And third, the mailbox has non-sticky-uids that doesn't seem to be very common thing and some clients don't handle that well (e.g. RoundCube).
Also, for some reason I had problem with moving messages from such folder in Outlook Express, XMail's logs showed failed POP3 connection, no idea why, I didn't debug it much.

And that's it.

Files:
Patch for UW IMAP 2007e, patch for RoundCube, IMAPd binary for Windows >= XP:

http://web.hisoftware.cz/sob/download/xmail-imap.rar

Other notes:
If you want to compile it yourself (and you should, using binaries from untrusted strangers is not good habit , download IMAP 2007e source, apply the patch and compile with:

Resulting imapd.exe is inetd server, it means you can't run it directly, but you need something like inetd. Original documentation recommends wsinetd and it works well, only website address is a little different: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wsinetd/

Remember, the whole thing is experimental, I'm the only one so far who tried to use it, so if you decide to play with it, be *very* careful!

XMail-based fork of dynamically developing IMAP4 server which solves this goal:

http://afterlogic.com/products/xmail-server-pro