I must be a little bit crazy and anti-paranoid about security for advertising this, but I also think that testing infrastructure is very important.
That’s why I have begun setting up different test IMAP servers for tinymail development. The domains might still have to be distributed to your providers DNS servers, I still have to make the mailbox for the user, etc etc.
I already created a little web interface that allows you start and stop the IMAP servers. Of course if I see too many planet users trying that out at the same time, I will disable it for a day or two. Just assume that it works :-).
The unit test environment of tinymail will probably get some scripts that will turn off and on certain IMAP servers for in case they will be testing capabilities that are specific for a specific IMAP server. They will indeed test online and reset the mailbox to its original state (which reminds me that I still have to add that to the web script).
Other projects are allowed to use the IMAP servers too (but do read the abuse item on the wiki page). Though there’s no promise that the services will always be available at all times and in its current shape.
I configured three virtual machines for this. Two of them are already running IMAP server software: one is running Dovecot and one Cyrus (the webscript allows for multiple installs to be stopped and started). Both the very latest and most unstable version that I could find. Yes I’m anti-paranoid about security and I do understand the risk that I’m taking here (and by blogging about it, I just increased that risk).
I welcome help from the server developers. If they want root on the machine and perform upgrades to the install of their softwares, then we can definitely discuss that. I’m also going to allow commercial IMAP softwares. But once many such servers have to run on the hardware simultaneously, I will not sponsor the hardware myself any longer. I guess that the commercial ones will have to get me hardware then.
So you can check more about it out here. I will be fine tuning it this evening and I might already change some unit tests to start using them too.