DRAFT: rev 0.2: 12/15/2001

Adding MyInbox Support to Cyrus
-------------------------------

Accessing email and shared messages from the web has traditionally
involved going through translators. For example, a web mail server
would talk to the mail server via IMAP and translate IMAP to HTTP for
the end client.

This can be very slow and resource intensive on the IMAP server. The
stateless nature of the web interacts poorly with IMAP's access model
and consumes an excessive amount of resources which results in poor
performance for the end user.  

The user usually does not have the option to chose which web mail
system is available and so is stuck with whatever option their
organization decides to adopt.

Microsoft, as part of the .NET initiative, is defining many services,
one of which is email.  This email service is currently named MyINBOX.

Microsoft has defined a set of schema and operations for the messaging
data.  We propose to augment the Cyrus IMAP server to provide the
MyInbox service. The service would directly access the data store;
just as the IMAP service access the data store.

This work will help Microsoft by showing an independent implementation
of a service in the .NET framework. This will help prove the openness
and provide an independent implementation to help work out any bugs or
interoperability problems in the specification. This should also help
any client developers. We will also be providing feedback and
suggestions on how to improve the current specification and fix any
errors that we detect during implementation.

This work will help CMU by providing 
     . an efficient webmail back-end service allowing the user to
       choose from a variety of .NET MyINBOX clients. 
     . an mechanism for portals to access messaing related information
     . an mechanism for shared folders to be accessed via the
       web. Shared folders including mailing lists, netnews/usenet,
       etc. 

--------------
Implementation
--------------

Using the Apache web server 2.0 we will export the messaging data
using SOAP and HTTP.  The Apache module would then use the same
underlying libraries that the IMAP server uses to access the mail
store. 

------------
Deliverables
------------

? also deliver a web based shared folder viewer? 

? may not need to be this aggressive.
? It will be somewhat hard to test without clients. Would we also
  implement the portal tie in? 

? probably about 4 months work of work for the server side. Probably 3
  months for the shared folder viewer. 

01/01/2001 - detailed project plan and cost plan done
02/01/2002 - design finalized
05/01/2002 - initial beta release
07/01/2002 - production release

? Can we get $200K from MS for this? too little? too much? Note that
this will need to be an unrestricted grant so we're going to lose big
to overhead.