How To fetch email from IMAP server with ajax

Question

I would like to know where to start if i wanted to create my own HTML & JS based email client.

Basically, is it possible to fetch email from a server using just AJAX, JS, JQuery, etc?

The client would not be hosted on the server where the email is fetched from, but if there is a problem of Cross-Orign requests, I can handle that with CORS.

I could not find any answer to my question even after searching.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You cannot directly connect to an IMAP server using just browser javascript. Browser's cannot make IMAP connections. You will need a least a server side proxy/application that can translate your web HTTP requests into IMAP requests over the Internet. However, every web based mail client I have ever seen uses a multi-tier architecture with browser code providing the user interface, a web application server providing the business logic, and in your case external email accounts providing most of the data itself.