Basically, as a lay person, to me this means it’s not licensed for use in anything you care about.

Fine for playing around with on your computer but not integrating with anything productive.

This is not legal advice though. Always consult a lawyer if you have legal questions.

It mostly means I haven’t yet figured out which kind of license/terms to use for this project. TBD.

Thanks for your work in this area. A couple questions.

How is this different to the wilduck webmail api?

Would it be hard to abstract away the wildduck storage code to use a datastore other than mongodb?

WildDuck API exposes database structures from MongoDB, IMAP API is more like a proxy in front of any IMAP server.

WildDuck is pretty much coupled with MongoDB. IMAP is not very easily abstractable and keeping the result scalable at the same time. Largest WildDuck cluster in production manages 20TB (~20k accounts) of email by now with no special config or modifications - making it scalable was the main goal from the start and supporting arbitrary storage would not have helped.

It remains to be seen if API shapes are copyrightable. :D

update. The project has now a OS license assigned, so it is perfectly legal to use