Twisted supports the IMAP protocol used by millions accross the world to remotely access their mailboxes. There is one extension of the IMAP protocol which is not handled by the Twisted client library and which is supported by the Dovecot, Gmail and many other mail servers: it is the IMAP IDLE commands which the client sends to the servers when it wants to be notified of the reception of new mails.
This is the push mail fonctionality which allows for faster reception of emails on the client and also better ressource usage by avoiding the frequent and needless polling of the mailbox for new messages.
This series illustrates the steps of the developments and integration of this extension into the Twisted Project. First, a prototype of the notification mechanism between a Twisted client and server is set up. Then, this mechanism is ported to IMAP, by extending the Twisted IMAP module. Then, this module interoperability is tested with a local installation of Dovecot/Postfix on one hand, and on the other hand with the Gmail servers, over SSL. Finally, the steps with connecting with the Twisted community and methods are presented, so that our code get merged upstream.