imap-flow

imap-flow is a thin abstraction over IMAP's distinct "protocol flows". These are literal handling, AUTHENTICATE, and IDLE.

The way these flows were defined in IMAP couples networking, parsing, and business logic. imap-flow untangles these flows, providing a minimal interface allowing sending and receiving coherent messages. It's a thin layer paving the ground for a correct client or server implementation.

Playground

This repository also serves as a playground for crates built on imap-flow. These will eventually be moved into their own repositories.

Notably, we have the proxy, tasks, and tag-generator workspace members.

• proxy is an already usable (but still not production-ready) IMAP proxy. It gracefully forwards unsolicited responses, abstracts away literal processing, and Debug-prints messages. Proxies are great for challenging the usability of a library, and we use them to validate our design decisions. (See the README.)
• tasks is our prototype of a higher-level IMAP library that abstracts away command and response handling into Tasks. This crate will eventually become what a client or server implementor should use to get IMAP right. Currently, only the client side is implemented.
• tag-generator generates process-wide unique (and unguessable) IMAP tags. This crate is here for organizational reasons and may be moved (or inlined) eventually.

License

This crate is dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT terms.

Thanks

Thanks to the NLnet Foundation for supporting imap-flow through their NGI Assure program!