[Dovecot] a proposal to increase the stability

[Tom Allison]

> What I am thinking of is to run those tests before anything new is
> released. On the other hand I cannot even estimate how much work would
> be needed for this ...
> 
> Udo Rader
> 

You could develop a test suite using something like perl.
The approach would be run beat the hell out of all the functionality 
that dovecot provides and validate the input/output against what is 
expected.  It's a black-box style of testing, but it would help indicate 
any potential problems.   It was through my own version of this that I 
found there are some limitations to how many UIDS I can transmit at one 
time.  But who expects >10,000 UIDS in a single call?

Between running IMAP calls to localhost and inspecting the local 
filesystem directly, I suspect a really nice test suite could be 
developed.  Interestingly, most of it could apply to more than just 
dovecot if you seperate testing for IMAP/Maildir standard formats from 
dovecot particulars (like indexing?).