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FWIW they were not Berkley DBs. IIRC the only db was the duplicate suppression feature.

Folders (mailboxes in proper IMAP lingo) had hand-built indexes. Good stuff. Credit to jgm, the original author.

that sounds right. and yes, very good stuff! i remember thinking at the time "hah. this is built with real computer science!". and well, at the time, it was the only thing that worked for large mail spools.

i also think it was the first support for sasl(?) encryption upgrades for legacy text/tcp mail protocols

also, fun sidebar: indices vs. indexes, both are apparently valid english... but it seems computer people have adopted the latter almost exclusively. never noticed it before...

SASL came out as a generalization of the IMAP AUTHENTICATE mechanism. CMU wanted Kerberos to work and it had been done as something of a one-off in telnet, and initially in IMAP. There were a couple companion protocols proposed for IMAP (stuff like contacts) that the same group was working on, and they wanted to leverage the same mechanism. From there, might as well do the same thing for POP and SMTP, etc. So they started working on a library (which Cyrus IMAP didn’t use for at least a while, sorry my fault).

Kind of funny that SASL is the most durable piece of the effort.

(I doubt this is entirely accurate. I wasn’t there for a lot of it.)

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