How to communicate to IMAP/Cyrus server through SOCKETS?

Claus · 10-31-2003, 07:31 AM

I'm working in a college project and i have to develop an application to administer IMAP/Cyrus servers using sockets instead cyradm.

But i can't find the commands that the IMAP/Cyrus protocol accept directly.. only references to cyradm commands

does somebody know where i can find that info????

thank you

chort · 10-31-2003, 10:39 AM

It won't accept administrative commands over the IMAP protocol, since that's strictly an e-mail protocol. Try using netstat to view the ports listening on your system. When you find an open port, try

Code:

grep number-of-port /etc/services

to see what that port is for. If it's not listed in /etc/services, it could be used by another application for some type of out-of-band management. Try doing a

Code:

telnet number-of-port

(if it's a TCP port) and see if there is some type of banner displayed indicating what service it is.

You can also try running a sniffer, such as ethereal or tcpdump on the host while you send commands over the web GUI. You can see which port those commands are going to on the backend.

Claus · 10-31-2003, 12:56 PM

I know what port it is... is the 143

But i need to know what i have to send thrught the sockets to make the tasks....

I know, by example, that the following string is is what i need to write to the socket if i want to know the quota of the user lala:

. getquota user.lala\n

But i don't know what others commands are availabile....

chort · 10-31-2003, 01:11 PM

I seriously doubt it's 143. That is the actual port that mail is retreived on. Are you positive that's the port you're supposed to use???

You need to figure out how cyradm passes commands to the program. Although there is an outside possibility that it uses the same port as mail traffic, it's very unlikely. That's what I was trying to help you with above. Basically you want to reverse engineer cyradm.

Check out http://www.web-cyradm.org/documentat...-cyradm.pdf.gz for some good information about setting up web/db integrated administration for Cyrus. I did not see anything in my brief scan that indicated it would act directly on the IMAP port.

For a list of IMAP RFCs, check out http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/pr.../imap.htm#RFCs

Pretty much anything listed as a command under IMAP4 should be supported by modern IMAP daemons.

Claus · 10-31-2003, 02:19 PM

Yeah, it's 143.... i'm absolutely sure ...