This is going to sound hopelessly nerdy.

I fed my first patch back to the open source community today! It’s for this app called imapproxy, designed to sit between webmail apps and imap servers and do connection caching. It was purported to only work on older versions of os x, but now it works in panther and tiger too :) So for all you uh… thousands of people out there running webmail on apple hardware worried about hammering your imap servers with webmail clients constantly turning over their connections, well… now you can upgrade your old os x boxes that are running imapproxy ;)

Finally, iPlanet imapd is poopy for not supporting SORT. I mean, come on.

andre@werk[work/imapproxy]telnet dirt.apple.com imap
Trying 17.216.22.117...
Connected to dirt.apple.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK dirt.apple.com Cyrus IMAP4 v2.2.12-OS X 10.3 server ready
2 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ MAILBOX-REFERRALS NAMESPACE UIDPLUS
ID NO_ATOMIC_RENAME UNSELECT CHILDREN MULTIAPPEND BINARY
SORT THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES ANNOTATEMORE IDLE
2 OK Completed
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.
andre@werk[work/imapproxy]telnet mail.apple.com imap
Trying 17.128.115.171...
Connected to mail.apple.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK Messaging Multiplexor (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 Patch 2 (built Jul 14 2004))
2 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN
LANGUAGE XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO AUTH=PLAIN STARTTLS
2 OK CAPABILITY completed
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.

When squirrelmail is configured to take advantage of server-side sorting, large mail boxes (say, around 5300 messages) load in like 2 seconds, compared to like 12 seconds. But only if the imap server supports SORT…