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I'm working on 'Reputation Management in Email Systems' as my MSc research project. The objective is to evaluate the reputation score of each contact/email address (in the contact list) of an email user and share the reputation information with other email users. I'm using Apache James for the implementation of the reputation server.

The problem I'm facing is how to retrieve the contact list/email addresses pertaining to a particular email user/mailbox.

In SMTP, IMAP email server architecture, is there a common way to retrieve a contact list? Or is the contact list maintained purely at the email client side?

Thanks,
Dileepa

Dileepa Jayakody
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1 Answers1

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There is no way to get an address book via IMAP. IMAP is a mail access protocol, not an address book access protocol.

Jan Kundrát
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  • hi Jan, yes I understand it's not accessible via IMAP. Is there any other way to access the contact list? Is it maintained at the email client side instead of the mailbox/ email server? – Dileepa Jayakody Aug 23 '13 at 09:31
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    Unfortunately, there is no single widely used way of accessing the address book, nope. Some servers put contacts into fake "messages" on an IMAP server (some of them in XML, others in vCard). Some clients talk LDAP, some clients do CardDAV,... – Jan Kundrát Aug 23 '13 at 09:40
  • @JanKundrát is there any documentation which can help me with which are the server sharing contacts over different protocols like LDAP or CardDAV. – biplav Aug 24 '14 at 20:47