How to retrieve the contact list of an email mailbox?

Question

I'm working on 'Reputation Management in Email Systems' as my MSc research project. The objective is to evaluate the reputation score of each contact/email address (in the contact list) of an email user and share the reputation information with other email users. I'm using Apache James for the implementation of the reputation server.

The problem I'm facing is how to retrieve the contact list/email addresses pertaining to a particular email user/mailbox.

In SMTP, IMAP email server architecture, is there a common way to retrieve a contact list? Or is the contact list maintained purely at the email client side?

Thanks,
Dileepa

Answer 1

There is no way to get an address book via IMAP. IMAP is a mail access protocol, not an address book access protocol.