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• Horde IMAP Client library

This library presents a fully abstracted interface to an IMAP server. It provides a native-PHP driver that is significantly faster, more feature-rich, and extensible as opposed to PHP's imap (c-client) extension.

Additionally, the library allows for abstracted access to POP3 servers via a native-PHP driver.

C-client drivers for both IMAP and POP3 are also provided as proof-of-concept.

++ People

Michael Slusarz created the library.

++ Description

The Socket library, which IMP 5.x uses for IMAP access, supports the following RFCs:

http://git.horde.org/co.php/framework/Imap_Client/lib/Horde/Imap/Client/Socket.php?rt=horde-git

Additionally, the class includes a UTF-8 to UTF7-IMAP converter, an IMAP mailbox sorter, and an abstracted caching library.

The library requires PHP 5.2.0+.

++ Features

• Fast. Horde_Imap_Client is orders of magnitude faster than the PHP imap extension (benchmarks to come).
• The PHP imap extension produces tremendously inefficient IMAP queries. Horde_Imap_Client has been ruthlessly tuned to eliminate duplicate/unneeded queries.
• Memory efficient. Horde_Imap_Client handles message data (which can easily be 10+ MB) entirely within PHP temporary streams. No more than 2 MB of a large data objects is stored in memory at any time.
• Built-in caching. No need to muck around with caching message data; this is all handled internally. Further, Horde_Imap_Client uses Horde_Cache which means that a large variety of caching options are available to use - anything from temporary files, SQL databases, to memcache servers can be used to cache this data.
• Standards compliant. Horde_Imap_Client is strictly RFC compliant.
• Additionally, Horde_Imap_Client implements important core functionality that may not be available on your server. Threading and FULL sorting (not a limited subset) are always available, regardless of whether your IMAP server supports the THREAD/SORT extensions.
• Liberally commented code. It may not be perfect. But at least we try to give you some idea of what's going on in there.
• Easy debugging. Full IMAP logs are available via a single configuration option.
• Advanced features.
• Horde_Imap_Client is the ONLY open-source PHP library that supports the CONDSTORE [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4551 RFC 4551] and QRESYNC [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5162 RFC 5162] IMAP extensions. These extensions ensure that changes made by other mail user agents (MUAs) are automatically synchronized. Without CONDSTORE, it is IMPOSSIBLE to cache flag information so loading a mailbox on every page load requires parsing every message for flag changes. Additionally, these extensions are absolutely essential to correctly implement an AJAX mail interface that properly synchronizes changes.
• Full ACL support, and provides abstracted management of the ACLs so that a developer does not need to worry whether the server supports "old" style ACLs [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2086 RFC 2086] or "new" style ACLs [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4314 RFC 4314].
• Supports, among others, [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3502 MULTIAPPEND], [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4469 CATENATE], [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4315 UIDPLUS], [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4731 ESEARCH], [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256 THREAD/SORT], [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5267 ESORT], and [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5819 LIST-STATUS] - most of these extensions were specifically designed for [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5550 disconnected clients] and vastly reduce the amount of bandwidth and processing need to keep the client synchronized with the server.
• Horde_Imap_Client was [http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/imapproxy-info/2008-October/000771.html responsible] for features added to [http://imapproxy.org/ imapproxy] to eliminate the need to re-establish the session every time a user accesses the server. Horde_Imap_Client is the ONLY open-source PHP library that leverages these features. See [http://lists.horde.org/archives/imp/Week-of-Mon-20110523/052316.html this message] for more details.

Further details can be found at http://lists.horde.org/archives/imp/Week-of-Mon-20110523/052285.html.

++ Known Broken Imap Servers

• Courier (as of, at least, 4.5.0)
  • SORT command on the server is broken - RFC 5256 [3] REQUIRES UTF-8 support, but Courier does not allow UTF-8 searches. Disabling the SORT capability on these servers is required (see imp/config/backends.php: capability_ignore option).
• Cyrus 2.4.14
  • Reported that disabling caching will fix ([http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/11115 Ticket #11115])

++ Resources

The library code can be found at http://git.horde.org/horde-git/-/browse/framework/Imap_Client/
Developer documentation (API) can be found at http://dev.horde.org/api/master/lib/Imap_Client/

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