#317 Replace commons-httpclient

[Julius]

I'm dealing with an environment with a proxy server that has trouble with commons-httpclient. As commons-httpclient is deprecated, are there any plans to upgrade to something newer? Would patches to achieve this be accepted?

[Mickael Guessant]

Well, DavMail relies heavily on advanced HttpClient features for authentication / connection pooling / kerberos support / ... so moving to something else would not be easy.

Apache HttpClient 4 is a nightmare, maybe switching back to straight HttpURLConnection would be the way to go with recent JDKs

[Julius]

Yes, that would also be my first suggestion. I never had (unsolvable) proxy issues when using HttpURLConnection while with commons-httpclient it tended to break. I also read online that with recent JDKs this supports NTLMv2, while commons-httpclient only supports older NTLM versions.

I suppose this could break compatibility with older JRE versions. Would that be considered blocking?

[Julius]

It turned out that there's a local firewall that explicitly blocks all JREs from making connections outside of the local network. There's a workaround by connecting to a local proxy (which doesn't work with DavMail), but for now I just set up the link using socat (which can go out) and let DavMail connect to a local port.

[Mickael Guessant]

Ok, no need to hurry then... Anyway the HttpURLConnection must still be considered for future versions.