Re: [gotmail] out there suggestion...

[John Fruetel]

I've actually thought about this quite a bit.  Gotmail is basically a fancy
'screen scraper' that looks like a regular user to Hotmail.  As such, it's
prone to break every time MS changes the hotmail pages, like what just
happened.

Paul Cannon, who worked on this project just before I did, also works on
hotwayd.  According to Paul, the http mail protocol isn't 100% either.  I'd
rather Paul spoke about this, but I got the impression from him that the
http mail protocol isn't a bad of roses either.  Although it's not as likely
to break as gotmail is, it has it's own set of problems.

I write web services all the time at work.  In fact, I use the amazon
webservices to test things.  I even have a webservice on bigfatdude to check
e-mails for spaminess.

The problem here is that Microsoft doesn't seem to want to make it easy to
use Hotmail via a webservice.  Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but as
far as I know http mail is still sorta proprietary to MS and they don't seem
interested in opening it up.  They want you to go to the web page to use
hotmail and see all the advertising.  In fact, some years ago, Outlook
Express would show the same ads as hotmail when you used OE as a hotmail
client.

So, I guess I'm agreeing here...  There is a lot of 'cross-over' development
happening here.  But I think that gotmail might be a little more functional
than hotwayd at the moment.  By 'functional', I mean it can do more.  But if
hotwayd can indeed do all the low-level functionality that gotmail needs,
I'm all for using it in the future.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Staniford" <address@hidden>
To: "'E H R'" <address@hidden>; <address@hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 5:00 PM
Subject: RE: [gotmail] out there suggestion...


> Hello,
>
> You're not the only one :-)  Have you heard of WSDL (Web service
> description language)?  Microsoft, Sun and IBM and are all piling loads
> of money into XML based web services for websites (there's open source
> stuff too I think) so that programs don't break when the interface
> changes.  The WSDL is stored in a public directory (Like LDAP) so that
> anyone can go and check out the interface and write programs for it.
> There are cool programs for java/perl etc that allow you to auto
> generate a set of classes (called stub classes) for the web services
> interface so all you have to do is call the methods from within your
> program and you can access all the data from the website.  You can
> already get these XML interfaces for amazon.com and many others.  So,
> once everyone has them, HTML changes won't break things like they do
> now.
>
> Benj..
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: address@hidden
> [mailto:gotmail-
> >address@hidden On Behalf Of E H R
> >Sent: 17 December 2003 00:41
> >To: address@hidden
> >Subject: [gotmail] out there suggestion...
> >
> >I have a rather large collection of webmails(on different systems) and
> tend
> >to need a whole collection of daemons to run them all, now I was
> looking at
> >one of them(for mail.com) and I remembered that since the hotmail and
> yahoo
> >rebuilds, a lot of work was going on.  Now I know the other
> >project(pywebmail) doesn't use the same language as gotmail(perl) but I
> >thought it was interesting it used xml for storing webmail-server
> >behaviour...  Could some kind of collaborative effort, perhaps using
> those
> >same xml files, be built, so that there is less duplication of effort
> when
> >hotmail et al decide to make our lives difficult?
> >
> >I've used fetchyahoo, gotmail, mrpostman, hotwayd, web2pop and
> pywebmail(at
> >least) so far, and I did notice that keeping up with the provides is
> >probably the largest part of the update work.
> >
> >Am I the only one who sees a great idea in this ?
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Gotmail-list mailing list
> >address@hidden
> >http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gotmail-list
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gotmail-list mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gotmail-list
>