Re: [dev] Suckless mail client solution?

I've managed to build tinymail..but a gobject framework of 16MB size is
not exactly
minimal, tiny or suckless in any way.

The repository comes with no commandline or non-gtk dependent example.

I still think that it is possible to implement a smtp/pop3/imap protocol
handler in less
than 1000LOC, all protocols are text based and by just defining a few
functions for
handling timeouts, responses and so on shouldnt be that hard.

6 years ago I wrote a mail daemon (SMTP) in about 500LOC able to manage
mbox,
several auth methods and mutliple connections at the same time.

fetchmail has lot of unnecessary features and lacks many useful
functionalities.

msmtp is cool, but I always find it unnecesarily complex for the things
it has to do. For
example, the network layer if wrapped by a bouncer can permit to keep
connections
alive, add encription, tunels and many other funny stuff.

What I'm proposing is a simple setup with wrappers for
sendmail,msmtp,whatever that
can be exchanged by just changing a hook script.

About attaching files I have some minimal base64 algorithms, so it
should be that hard
to make it work in stream like:

  $ cat mail | add-attachments mail.d/* | msmtp mail_AT_to.com

And the same for extracting the attachments.

I dont really think this is a loss of time (yeah, you can hate me), but
I hate to be forced
to use bloatware everywhere.

I also use tinymail on the n810 because is the one that comes by default
in the last
firmwares because is just much better than the monolitic approach from
Nokia, but
having 16MB++ of memory slurped by a mail library on an embedded device
is imho
not a good thing. But I understand that having dbus to avoid doing
innecessary stuff
when the device is offline and earn battery is a good thing, but at
least I would prefer
to have my own minimal stack of mail management.

--pancake

Kurt H Maier wrote:
> Check out tinymail[1]. This guy took a pretty cerebral approach to
> developing his MUA back-end library. I've used it in the form of
> Modest[2] on my Nokia n810.
>
> Personally, I'd hate to see any more dev hours wasted on garbage like
> imap or pop3. ssh/rsyncing maildir to form a 'local copy,' then
> 'commiting' changes back seems much saner to me.
>
> [1] - http://tinymail.org/
> [2] - http://modest.garage.maemo.org/
>
>
Received on Wed Oct 07 2009 - 14:10:00 UTC