More involved parsing

[jonhoo]

Currently, all the commands simply return Vec<String>. It'd be great if they returned more semantically relevant results (i.e., fully parsed structs). This would also let us make the IDLE handle return an Iterator over said structs, so you could monitor changes to the mailbox in real-time.

[jonhoo]

This also applies to arguments. For example, the sequence_set argument to fetch should probably be a Vec<Uid> or something, and should probably return something akin to a HashMap<Uid, _>.

[sanmai-NL]

Would you be interested to cooperate with @djc on this? He has written another IMAP crate that supports nom-based server response parsing. I suppose a concerted effort is the best way forward. 🙂

[djc]

If you're interested we can probably split the protocol data structures and parser out of tokio-imap so that they can more easily be reused. In terms of encoding, so far I've mostly used str slices, although I recently changed the parser so that it returns bytes for message contents (for the RFC822 FETCH attribute only so far).

[jonhoo]

@djc That would be awesome!

[djc]

The imap-proto crate is now live on crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/imap-proto.

[jonhoo]

Docs at https://docs.rs/imap-proto/0.1.0/imap_proto/. Not too wordy atm, but still useful.
I don't know that I'll have time to look into incorporating this particularly soon, but it's on my radar. Otherwise, PRs welcome!

[djc]

I probably won't work on the integration between rust-imap and imap-proto, but if people find gaps in imap-proto for stuff that rust-imap, I can have a look at those.

[jonhoo]

@djc yeah, I wasn't expecting that you would, just wanted to comment for others watching this issue :)
I might contribute some updates to the docs for imap-proto when I get around to incorporating it too.

[jonhoo]

@djc from a cursory review, it looks like imap-proto expects all strings to be valid UTF-8. As has been pointed out elsewhere (see #54 for a summary), this can be a problem for some applications. Do you have a plan for the future for how you'll deal with servers that use other charsets?

[jonhoo]

Filed djc/imap-proto#5 including a proposed solution.