Ask HN: open standards for mail storage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1156033

by hyuen • 16 years ago

5 1 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi all, I was wondering if there are any standards/documentation for storing mail, either in the server, or in e-mail clients? I am specially interested in how companies like Xobni are able to crawl the data from the user's mailboxes. A poor man's crawler could be probably with an IMAP client, but that doesn't sound particularly efficient.

Scott_MacGregor• 16 years ago

Email messages are stored in open human readable text on the email server, unless they are encrypted.

An Administrator on a Microsoft server with the proper permission level can open the mail directory on the server and see all of the user directories inside. Then simply open the directory and see all of the email message files. Since they are plain text they can be opened with a text editor such as WordPad and easily read.

Linux is the same.

I am not sure if XOBNI crawls the user mailbox on the email server. More likely, it is getting the information it needs from the Outlook .pst file that is on the user’s client machine. The .pst file is a little database just for Outlook to use.

I went to a Microsoft Office developers brunch a while back (good food) and I think I remember they said that they were opening a lot of their Office products to developers so they could make apps to tie in to them.

Here is link to the MSN Developers Network that might help you: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

Ask HN: open standards for mail storage?

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