Mail::IMAPClient 

COPYRIGHT

                       Copyright 1999, The Kernen Group, Inc.
                            All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of either:

	a) the "Artistic License" which comes with this Kit, or


	b) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software 
	Foundation; either versio n 1, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See either
the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details.


DESCRIPTION

This module provides perl routines that simplify a sockets connection 
to and an IMAP conversation with an IMAP server. 

COMPATIBILITY

To date this module has been tested on Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 against 
Netscape IMAP servers versions 3.6 and 4.1. However, since it is written 
in perl and designed for flexibility, it should run on any OS with a 
TCP/IP stack and a version of perl that includes Socket.pm and IO::Socket.pm. 
It also should be able to talk to any IMAP server, even those that have, um, 
proprietary features (assuming that the programmer knows what those features 
are).

DEPENDENCIES

The Mail::IMAPClient module uses the IO::Socket module to make a socket 
connection to an IMAP server and the Socket module to get some constants. 

You can verify that your system has a sufficient perl installation by 
entering on the command line:

perl -e 'use Socket; use IO::Socket;'

If you get compile errors then you'll have trouble using Mail::IMAPClient.

INSTALLATION

Generally, gunzipping and untarring the source file, running 'perl Makefile.PL' 
and 'make install' are all it takes to install this module. And if that's too
much work you can always use the CPAN module!  ;-)

OVERVIEW OF FUNCTIONALITY

Mail::IMAPClient.pm provides methods to simplify the connection to and the 
conversation between a perl script and an IMAP server. Virtually all IMAP Client
commands (as defined in rfc2060) are supported, either through IMAPClient object
methods or the 'default method', which is an AUTOLOAD hack that assumes a 
default syntax for IMAP Client commands of:

	 tagvalue COMMAND [Arg1 [Arg2 [... Arg3]]]"

By remarkable coincidence, AUTOLOAD's default syntax mimics the general syntax
of IMAP Client commands. This means that if a script tries to use any undefined
method then that method will be interpreted as an unimplemented IMAP command, and
the default syntax will be used to create the command string. I did this as a short
cut to writing a bunch of methods that were practically the same. There are 
inheritance implications because of this approach but as far as I can tell this
is not a serious limitation. However, if you decide to write modules that inherit
from this class that require AUTOLOAD logic of their own then you will have to 
take the Mail::IMAPClient's AUTOLOAD strategy into account. 

Where methods are defined, they usually exist to add functionality, perhaps by 
massaging output or by supplying default arguments. An example is the search
method, which accepts the same arguments as the SEARCH IMAP Client command (as
documented in RFC2060) but which massages the results so that the return value
is an array of message sequence numbers matching the search criteria, rather 
than a line of text listing the sequence numbers.

Some methods exists solely to add functionality, such as the folders method, which 
invokes the list method but then massages the results to produce an array 
containing all folder names. The message_count and delete_messsage methods are 
similarly examples of methods that add funtion to "raw" IMAP Client commands.

Further information is provided in the module's documentation, which you are 
encouraged to read and enjoy.

Good Luck!

Dave Kernen
The Kernen Group, Inc.
David.Kernen@erols.com