Re: PINE clone

[jmiller]

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 23:14, address@hidden wrote:
> >
> > So, do you know of anything out there yet?
>
> Wow, I haven't thought about this project in ages.  The project, called
> 'hydrant', is dormant but not forgotten.  The idea was to setup hydrant
> as a collection of libraries on top of mailutils that provide MUA
> functionality.  That way other MUAs could be trivially written and get
> what they need.  So message composition would have all the hooks needed
> for GPG signing, signatures, generating headers, etc.  Mailutils would
> provide all of the MIME handling, mailbox and folding handling
> (including pop3, imap4, maildir, mh, mbox).
>
> Mailutils exists today and is fully usable.
>
> Once you have all of those types of hooks, it should be possible to
> completely rewrite pine in a couple of days, because the underlying
> technology would just be pieces of a puzzle thrown together.
>
> Sergey and I talk about it occasionally, but I have to admit to being
> more interested in the MTA side at the moment, and possibly a mailing
> list manager.  I need both of these for some paying work, and
> evolution's been a good enough MUA for me for a couple of years now.
>


Hydrant sounds like the project I was looking for. I'll take a look at it
and see if there's anything I can do.
I'm probably going to keep wasting time on this pine in perl clone,
because I'd like to get my hands dirty first, and flesh out what all
structures there needs to be, and this is the fastest way I can do that.
Besides, it's kinda fun, and results in something that may just be usable.

I've attached a copy of what I have so far. I'd like to create a project
page for it somewhere, but I'm putting it off for right now (what I have
really needs completely restructured, and it's currently changing
rapidly... I"ll put something up when it starts to stabalize a bit).

Does MailUtils support imaps (IMAP over SSL) and pop3s (pop3 over SSL)? I
wasn't able to determine that from the documentation.

One of the reasons I started writing this, which has become a secondary
issue now (primary being replace pine), is that I wanted to dump my mail
into an sql database, and read it from within pine. Any idea how much work
it'll be to add that to MailUtils (or if that patch would even be
accepted)? I haven't done much with C, so I'm don't know what the dev time
would look like. I could probably add support to Mail-Box perl module in 2
or 3 hours, which will be good for prototyping at least, but in the end I
want to have a nice clone written in C++.

Thanks,
--
Josh I.

nmail.tar.gz
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