Is there a toolbox that provides a web interface (xmlrpc, REST, whatever) to remote IMAP servers?

Question

I am working on a Google App Engine project that needs to access IMAP. Context.IO is not efficient enough for my purposes, but I would like something like that: I want to log in, access and manipulate hundreds of IMAP mailboxes from Google App Engine, using either a third-party service or application server, which I posted on a dedicated hosting server.

As you can imagine, this is mainly about restricting the opening of open sockets in GAE.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

I don’t know of any prepared solution, but you don’t need to do too much effort or take too much time. You can build IMAPClient and SimpleXMLRPCServer on the server and use xmlrpclib on the client.

You will need to think about a way to maintain state between calls, since XmlRPC is a connectionless protocol (like most other RPC mechanisms) and implements some form of service authentication. I wrote a class inherited from SimpleXMLRPCServer that supports SSL connections and HTTP Basic Auth ( xmlrpclib already has support for both elements). If you are interested in the code, give me a scream.

Answer 2

Take a look at Mailgun ; it offers a robust API and supports IMAP V4. ^*

^{* IMAP mailboxes are on Mailgun}