My Home is My Post-Office: Evaluation of a decentralized email architecture on Internet-of-Things low-end device

Users predominantly access their email via mobile devices. This presents a two-fold challenge to the email applications. First, email's update from multiple devices has to be eventually reconciled with the server. Prioritization of updates is difficult and maybe undesirable. Solving this problem requires a data store with the complete history of email changes. Second, legacy email protocols don't provide an optimal email synchronization and access in mobile environment. In this paper we are proposing to take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomena. In IoT environment a user may have multiple interconnected in-home low-end devices with publicly accessible address. In this architecture we move the email application from the central service into user's in-home and mobile devices, store complete email history on each device, and replace legacy IMAP and SMTP protocols with a synchronization protocol found in Distributed Version Control Systems(DVCS). This addresses the email reconciliation issue, optimizes the bandwidth usage, and intrinsically puts the user in control of her data. We analyze a number of stores and synchronization implementations and compare them with the open source Dovecot email server.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figures, 1 table, ICC'17, Cambridge, U

IMAP4 Extensions for Quick Mailbox Resynchronization

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards " (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. This document defines an IMAP4 extension, which gives an IMAP client the ability to quickly resynchronize any previously opened mailbox as part of the SELECT command, without the need for server-side state or additional client round-trips. This extension also introduces a new response that allows for a more compact representation of a list of expunged messages (and always includes the Unique Identifiers (UIDs