Introduction

The Personal Mail Storage aims to solve problems with reading one or more e-mail and news feed accounts from multiple computers, retaining the read status meta data, and allowing full operation when being off-line.

Note
TODO

This is at present only a specification, an implementation will hopefully become available later.

Use-cases

Requirements

Note
TODO

Requirements will change, and more will quite possibly be added to this specification.

Discussion

What's wrong with POP3?

What's wrong with IMAP4?

Diagram

               [ POP3 ]  [ IMAP4 ]  [ NNTP ]
                    \        |        /
                    ------------------
   [ RSS/Atom ] --- | fetch messages | --- [ Other ]
                    ------------------
                        /
                       /
           ---------------------
           | spam/virus filter | (optional)
           ---------------------
                   /
                  /
              -------       ---------------
              | PMS | <---> | Synchronize |
              -------       ---------------
               /
              /
      ------------------
      | Serve messages | --- [ Other ]
      ------------------
     /        |      \
[ IMAP4 ]  [ RSS ]  [ POP3 ]

Design

The design is intended to be simple. The only way to communicate with the storage is through these core operations:

Separate tools

The intention is to use a separate tool for fetching e-mail messages, and serving mail to local mail user agents.

All interaction with the storage is done using the storage API functionality. Tools can be written in a variety of languages such as Python scripts, or anything preferred.

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