couchmail basic mail handling tools for couchdb

Abstract

couchmail is an project for storing and accessing mails in couchdb for archiving and accessing. Currently the prototype just tries to implement import of Maildir archives to couchdb using the Python programming language. Later this might be changed to run on node.js. But no desicions are made yet. At the moment it acts as a sandbox for playing with mails in couchdb.

Status

This project is an experiment. This document is an draft and may act as an implementation guide or an idea pool.

Basic goals

• Bulk Mail import
• Standard JSON format
• Simple mail web frontend
• Basic statistic tools
• Basic mail accessing JS library
• Being a platform for experiments
• Experiment with _id handling
• Experiment with threading
• Experiment with data mining and content linking

Dependencies

Beside that this may subject to rapid changes I want to keep the dependency list up to date.

• Python 2.6
• couchdb

Mail import

The basic feature of couchmail is to import message archives to CouchDB. The importer can be used to import your existing mailboxes to CouchDB.

Planned Bulk Connectors:

• Maildir (needs work)
• mbox (not implemented yet)
• IMAP (not implemented yet)

Additionally there should be an SMTP sink in a way that can be connected to an MTA like exim or postfix to deliver E-Mail to couchmail.

Web Interface

Mails should be browsable via web. For bulk mailing lists and bulk archives a threaded view should be the default. Since one of the goals of couchmail is the standardisation of the JSON format additional frontends should be possible. There should be a simple JS library for accessing the stored mails.

Mail output

A future goal of couchmail is to implement an IMAP frontend. This can be used to access the stored mail with any IMAP capable Mail client like mutt, thunderbird etc.

Misc

• https://gist.github.com/806797
• https://github.com/theodoreb/couchdb-maildir-fuse
• http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fddnd/a_work_in_progress_experimenting_with_couchdb_as/
• http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/cXBGjJytnclaPITmbsb2
• http://www.mail-archive.com/couchdb-user@incubator.apache.org/msg02025.html
• http://www.dbmail.org/