Well many reasons :
- First, I (or other testers) may not have karma to modify the mail server
configuration.
so you don't have root on your local machine?..
Again, running tests with imap/mysql/.. accounts that are not test-only is a risk. Something might go wrong and delete all your emails or the whole DB.
- Then, I don't understand why those paremeters are hardcoded, compared to
MySQL tests for example that offer a way to change hostname/user/password
through bash variables.
If it can be done easily, yes, sure, why not? But you're saying that you would need to use regexes and so on. That has 2 problems: it's a lot of trouble to write and maintain, and the validation of the output won't be as strict as it is right now.
Anyway, we appreciate the contribution of more tests to the imap extension or any other :)
Nuno