imap: A common lisp library for sending and receiving email.

Table of contents

• Description
• Author
• Author comments
• Documentation
• Platforms
• Dependencies
• Installation
• Configuration
• Licence
• Notes
• Examples
• Open Source

Description

A client library for sending and receiving email.

Author

John Foderaro, Franz Inc.

Author comments

The most popular protocol for accessing a mailbox was the Post Office Protocol (POP) defined in rfc1939. While it is popular, pop has very few features. It doesn't allow you to manage the mail on the server itself, instead you usually just download all mail to your local machine. A much more powerful protocol called the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) was defined in the 1996 document rfc2060. With imap you can work with your mail while it's on the server and can create folders on the server in which to archive your mail. Thus the server itself can be the message store which is useful if you want to access your mail from more than one machine. You are not required to use the server to archive your mail with imap, you can use it like pop and download all the mail to your local machine.

Sending email is done via the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). You can use smtp to send mail directly to the destination but typically this is not done because the destination machine may be down or unreachable at the time you wish to send the mail. Most organizations have a local mail server that is up and reachable all of the time. You can use smtp to send your letter to that local mail server and it will then take over the job of getting the mail to the destination (which may involve queueing the message and retrying to send it over a period of days).

Platforms

Allegro Common Lisp 7.0 and newer on all platforms.

Dependencies

None, but for the test suite, tester is required.

Installation

Start Allegro Common Lisp and load the load.cl file

:ld /path/to/load.cl

Configuration

Set the following variables to true for extra debugging information:

(setq net.post-office::*debug-imap* t 
      net.post-office::*smtp-debug* t)

Documentation

• pop and imap interfaces
• smtp interface
• Also see the imap.html file that is included with this source code.

License

The aserve source code is licensed under the terms of the Lisp Lesser GNU Public License, known as the LLGPL. The LLGPL consists of a preamble and the LGPL. Where these conflict, the preamble takes precedence. This project is referenced in the preamble as the LIBRARY.

Notes

For reference please see rfc1939 (pop) and rfc2060 (imap).

Examples and Information

See the first link in the documenation section above for examples.

Franz Inc. Open Source Info

This project's homepage is http://opensource.franz.com. There is an informal community support and development mailing list opensource@franz.com for these open source projects. We encourage you to take advantage by subscribing to the list. Once you're subscribed, email to opensource@franz.com with your questions, comments, suggestions, and patches.