Lumail continues to progress

Although I've still not got the ability to reply to messages, and composing new ones is ugly, my toy mail client is working nicely.

I've received a couple of patches, and given commit access to the repository to one other user.

Currently I'm still juggling primitives around and working out what is missing. The big exceptions are the obvious:

• Cannot reply to a message.
• Cannot move a message to a new folder.
• When composing a mail to be sent no copy is saved in "sent-mail", or similar.
• Thread-view is absent. Indefinitely.

But on the plus side the lua scripting is lovely:

precious ~/git/lumail $ rm /tmp/unread.log
precious ~/git/lumail $ ./lumail  --rcfile ./lumail.lua --eval "dump_unread();"
precious ~/git/lumail $ head /tmp/unread.log
Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.Automated.backups
	Folder has 10 unread messages
Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.Automated.bounces
	Folder has 3 unread messages
Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.CRM.Spam
	Folder has 7 unread messages
Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.facebook.com
	Folder has 4 unread messages
..

The website needs some love, most notably a logo. And there are several reported bugs/todo-items I need to work through.

Still for a toy program I'm using it daily. (Though still using mutt to reply to messages & view/save attachments.)

Syndicated 2013-05-23 12:22:37 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Some good, some bad

Today my main machine was down for about 8 hours. Oops.

That meant when I got home, after a long and dull train journey, I received a bunch of mails from various hosts each saying:

• Failed to fetch slaughter policies from rsync://www.steve.org.uk/slaughter

Slaughter is my sysadmin utility which pulls policies/recipies from a central location and applies them to the local host.

Slaughter has a bunch of different transports, which are the means by which policies and files are transferred from the remote "central host" to the local machine. Since git is supported I've now switched my policies to be fetched from the master github repository.

This means:

• All my servers need git installed. Which was already the case.
• I can run one less service on my main box.
• We now have a contest: Is my box more reliable than github?

In other news I've fettled with lumail a bit this week, but I'm basically doing nothing until I've pondered my way out of the hole I've dug myself into.

Like mutt lumail has the notion of "limiting" the display of things:

• Show all maildirs.
• Show all maildirs with new mail in them.
• Show all maildirs that match a pattern.
• Show all messages in the currently selected folder(s)
  • More than one folder may be selected :)
• Shall all unread messages in the currently selected folder(s).

Unfortunately the latter has caused an annoying, and anticipated, failure case. If you open a folder and cause it to only show unread messages all looks good. Until you read a message. At which point it is no longer allowed to be displayed, so it disappears. Since you were reading a message the next one is opened instead. WHich then becomes marked as read, and no longer should be displayed, because we've said "show me new/unread-only messages please".

The net result is if you show only unread messages and make the mistake of reading one .. you quickly cycle through reading all of them, and are left with an empty display. As each message in turn is opened, read, and marked as non-new.

There are solutions, one of which I documented on the issue. But this has a bad side-effect that message navigation is suddenly complicated in ways that are annoying.

For the moment I'm mulling the problem over and I will only make trivial cleanup changes until I've got my head back in the game and a good solution that won't cause me more pain.

Syndicated 2013-05-14 20:23:08 from Steve Kemp's Blog

The rain in Scotland mainly makes me code

Lumail <http://lumail.org> received two patches today, one to build on Debian Unstable, and one to build on OpenBSD.

The documentation of the lua primitives is almost 100% complete, and the repository has now got a public list of issues which I'm slowly working on.

Even though I can't reply to messages I'm cheerfully running it on my mail box as a mail-viewer. Faster than mutt. Oddly enough. Or maybe I'm just biased.

Syndicated 2013-05-11 14:08:15 (Updated 2013-05-11 23:12:59) from Steve Kemp's Blog

So progress is going well on lumail

A massive marathon has resulted in my lumail mail client working well.

Functionally the application looks little different to the previous C-client, but it is a lot cleaner, neater, and nicer internally.

The configuration file luamail.lua gives a good flavour of the code, and the github repository has brief instructions.

Initially I decied that the navigation/index stuff was easy and the rest of the program would be hard; dealing with GPG-signatures, MIME-parts, etc.

But I'm stubborn enough to keep going.

If I can get as far as reading messages, with MIME handled properly, and replying then I can switch to using it immediately which will spur further development.

I'm really pleased with the keybinding code, and implementing the built-in REPL-like prompt was a real revelation. Worht it for that alone.

The domain name lumail.org was available. So I figured why not?

Syndicated 2013-05-07 18:40:27 from Steve Kemp's Blog

After you've started it seems like a bad idea?

To recap: given the absence of other credible alternatives I had two options:

• Re-hack mutt to give me a sidebar that will show only folders containing new messages.
• Look at writing a "simple mail client". Haha. Ha. Hah.

I think there is room for a new console client, because mutt is showing its age and does feel like it should have a real extension language - be it guile, lisp, javascript(!), Lua, or something else.

So I distilled what I thought I wanted into three sections:

• mode-ful. There would be a "folder-browsing mode", a "message-browsing mode" and a "read-a-single-message" mode.
• There would be scripting. Real scripting. I chose Lua.
• You give it ~/Maildir as the configuration. Nothing else. If the damn computer cannot find your mailboxes something is wrong.

So how did I do? I wrote a ncurses-based client which has Lua backed into it. You can fully explore the sidebar-mode - which lets you select multiple folders.

From there you can view the messages in a list.

What you can't do is anything "real":

• Update a messages flags. new -> read, etc.
• GPG-validation.
• MIME-handling.
• Attachment viewing.

For a two-day hack it is remarkably robust, and allowing scripting shows awesomeness. Consider this:

--
-- show all folders in the Maildir-list.
--
function all()
   -- ensure that the sidebar displays all folders
   sidebar_mode = "all";
   -- we're going to be in "maildir browsing mode"
   cmail_mode = "sidebar";
   reset_sidebar();
   refresh_screen();
end

--
-- Test code, show that the pattern-searching works.
--
-- To use this press ":" to enter the prompt, then enter "livejournal".
--
-- OR press "l" when in the sidebar-mode.
--
function livejournal()
   sidebar_pattern = "/.livejournal.2";
   sidebar_mode = "pattern";
   reset_sidebar();
   refresh_screen();
end

--
-- There is a different table for each mode.
--
keymap = {}
keymap['sidebar'] = {}
keymap['index']   = {}
keymap['message'] = {}

--
-- In the sidebar-mode "b" toggles the sidebar <-> index.
--
-- ":" invokes the evaluator.
-- "q" quits the browser and goes to the index-mode.
-- "Q" quits the program entirely.
--
keymap['sidebar'][':'] = "prompt-eval"
keymap['sidebar']['b'] = "toggle"
keymap['sidebar']['q'] = "toggle"
keymap['sidebar']['Q'] = "exit"

-- show all/unread/livejournal folders
keymap['sidebar']['a'] = "all"
keymap['sidebar']['u'] = "unread"
keymap['sidebar']['l'] = "livejournal"

Neat, huh? See the cmail.lua file on github for more details.

My decision hasn't really progressed any further, though I can see that if this client were complete I'd love to use it. Its just that the remaining parts are the fiddly ones.

I guess I'll re-hack mutt, and keep this on the back-burner.

The code is ropey in places, but should you wish to view:

• https://github.com/skx/cmail

And damn C is kicking my ass.

Syndicated 2013-04-30 15:03:35 from Steve Kemp's Blog