MBOX-Line: From gilles.lamiral at laposte.net  Mon Mar 23 16:10:04 2015
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Gilles LAMIRAL <gilles.lamiral@laposte.net>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:54 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] Is OpenEmailSurvey open to share method or code?
Message-ID: <55109D4C.2080900@laposte.net>

Dear Imapeers,

I'm writing to discuss about thr OpenEmailSurvey project
http://www.openemailsurvey.org/

I got this link from Dovecot's CTO, Ville Savolainen. A few months ago
I asked Ville some questions about OpenEmailSurvey but he might be
busy running Dovecot businesses. No problem with that. This imap discussion
list may be a better place to get some answers and collaboration, more
people, more perspectives.

My main goal is to add a wizard mode to imapsync, a mode where options
for specific imap servers are set automagically. Avoiding that users
and I always read and apply the same FAQ items is a user experience
improvement I aim.

It looks like the OpenEmailSurvey project is tremendous for that
purpose. So I have questions about it.

Do you share on OpenEmailSurvey project?
Is there a mailing-list or similar?
Are code or principles to detect real imap server softwares open?

When users ask me about problems with imap servers they even don't
know the software name, I usually look at the CAPABILITY response,
NAMESPACE, some other imap responses or some nmap service detection.
I always get the name of it. I haven't formalized it yet in a script,
I've played by hand for now, not so often. I'm lazy, so before doing
it all by myself I ask you if I'll have to reinvent the wheel or not
on that matter.

My other questions about OpenEmailSurvey, less important for my
purpose, are the followings:

100% IPv4 scanned is claimed: How do you deal with abuse reports?
What means a crossed out imap server on
http://www.openemailsurvey.org/ ?

In fact, I  started a similar project some years ago (2008). It was
quite efficient, millions of servers scanned everyday from a small
connexion. But I encountered warning issues from my ISP, abuse
complains. It was a pure statistical study but I finally named it Scanty
and put it somewhere with ideas to avoid those abuse complains, ideas
like reverse resolution ok (PTR), abuse complains IP list hardcoded
("never come back here"), whois resolution, don't come back too often
etc.

At that time, 2008, I got around 0.24% of all hosts with port 143 open
on imap while OpenEmailSurvey scored 0.1% in 2013. It looks like Gmail and Big
cloud webmails have stolen half of the imap market share.

Thanks in advance for your input.


-- 
Au revoir,                             09 51 84 42 42
Gilles Lamiral. France, Baulon (35580) 06 20 79 76 06

