While that would have been nice, I would have had to make some pretty difficult compromises. The biggest one is, I'd have to pretty much not hold anything in memory for longer than absolutely necessary; since IMAP sessions are long-lived and mostly idle, it'd be very easy to run out of memory even if most logged-in users are not actively doing stuff. I'd probably not want to do Java serialization of metadata then (Prevayler or no), instead creating my own metadata file format (or using one of the ones out there) and hitting the disk for every operation.
Either that, or just use a database. That would not be my first choice though, because the main goal here is simplicity and ease of installation. (If in the future I decide to revisit this decision, a possibility may be an embedded Java database--they're out there, right?)
By targetting the server at small groups of power e-mail users, I can make it *extremely* responsive (except for complex searches... heh) at the price of having, say, a 2-10MB memory footprint per session. Anyway, sites that are big enough for that to be a problem probably have the expertise to use Cyrus or the money to use Exchange.
Oh, I've also decided to add a POP server as sort of a bootstrap, so I can start using Poorman for my own mail as soon as the mailstore is finished rather than waiting for the whole IMAP protocol implementation to be complete. (POP really is a pretty ridiculously simple protocol... wrapping the mailstore with it should take maybe an hour, including all optional commands.)
Anyway, it's all shaping up quite nicely so far. Once the mailstore is done I'll have to look into putting up a public source repository--probably not Sourceforge, though; I can't deal with cvs.