Thursday, September 28, 2006

AOL IMAP Server Supports "IDLE"

I listened to the latest edition of the MacBreak Weekly podcast (or netcast... whatever) today and Leo Laporte mentioned a plugin for Apple's Mail.app program called "IMAP Idle." I did a little digging and found out that anyone can check whether their mail service's IMAP servers support IDLE (RFC 2177) using a simple telnet command. Here's what I found out about America Online's (and apparently also Compuserve's) IMAP mail service:
telnet imap.aol.com 143
Trying 64.12.138.215...
Connected to imap.cs.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK imap-m08 v50_b4.1 server ready
a capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ XAOL-ENVELOPE XAOL-ENVELOPE-TF XAOL-NETMAIL XAOL-OPTION XAOL-FBR.OLD IDLE BINARY AUTH=XAOL-UAS-MB XAOL-FILTER QUOTA XAOL-REPORTSPAM XAOL-UNSEND XAOL.STATUS UIDPLUS NAMESPACE
a OK CAPABILITY completed
z logout
In other words, AOL supports IDLE. Yippee! Of course, if I had bothered to check the IMAP Idle blog entry to find out that there's a new version of this spiffy Apple Mail plugin available, I would have known that it now tells you whether your IMAP server supports IDLE or not. D'oh! Oh well, I hope someone on the Internet finds my research useful. You're more than welcome to post here if the info above helped you in some way.