Re: [gotmail] out there suggestion...

[paul cannon]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 10:22:20PM -0800, John Fruetel wrote:
> Using the WebDav protocol (like hotwayd does) is by far the best way.  OE
> doesn't break because it uses this protocol.  I'm not sure how well
> documented that interface is though.  I was looking at the hotwayd page and
> it looks like they do an excellent job getting messages, but some of the
> things that gotmail does, like only getting new messages, might be a little
> more difficult in WebDav.  Still, I don't really know that much about the
> WebDav protocol.  If it's powerful enough to do the stuff that gotmail does,
> like delete messages, only-get new messages, stuff like that, I'm all for
> it.  Paul Cannon knows quite about this, maybe he can offer some
> suggestions.

I'm hardly intimately familiar with the webDAV protocol either, but most
of hotwayd's limitations come from the choice to use the POP3 protocol
on the user side. POP3 is very limited; it has no built-in way to
distinguish new messages from old, or send options to the server. Mail
clients that use POP3 can try to check for only-new mail by comparing
the UIDLs (unique id listings) of the messages on the server with those
already downloaded. Problem is, the server is supposed to assign the
UIDLs. Hotwayd isn't really the server that holds the messages, so that
introduces problems maintaining unique and consistent UIDLs for the
messages on Hotmail's servers.

I hope that explains some of the issues. Hotwayd might well be able to
have all of gotmail's features if it used IMAP, for example, instead of
POP3, or could be run as a command-line tool like gotmail. It's not
limitations in the webDAV implementation, as far as I know.

There are downsides to using webDAV, though. As I mentioned, you still
need to tweak things from time to time to make it work with Hotmail.
Another is that webDAV may go away at some point: this is unconfirmed,
but I'll tell you what I know. I was contemplating abandoning gotmail
some time ago in favor of hotwayd, and I received a few mails (more than
one) from people claiming to have been working for Hotmail. They said
webDAV might not stick around, and asked me to continue working on
Gotmail (they used it :).

They might not have been real, but it enough to keep me working on
gotmail. It's probably good that we have different tools for this job;
hotwayd can be used when gotmail breaks, and hopefully vice versa.

I hope I've not said anything offensive to the hotwayd team. Hotwayd is
a terrific product and works very well.

-- 
.------------------------------------------------------------.
| paul cannon                                 address@hidden |
|                             http://people.debian.org/~pik/ |