9 Jul 2013 Stevey   » (Master)

lumail is complete

So, writing an email client, how did that turn out? Pretty damn well as it happens.

My views continue to range from "email is easy" to "email is hard". But I'm now using my home-grown mail-client for 100% of my personal mail-handling.

Writing a mail client did seem a little crazy when I started, but the problem breaks down into a few distinct steps and individually they're not so hard:

  • Display a list of folders.
  • Display a list of messages.
  • Display a single message.

Once you've got that you're almost 80% complete. You're just missing things like "delete", "reply", "compose", and those things are pretty simple to implement.

I definitely made the right call in making it scriptable with Lua, because I've been able to write so many functions for working with mail. For example marking messages in all folders matching a regular expression.

The code is pretty well structured, and now I've got TAB-completion support on all primitives and user-additions I'm finding it a lot nicer to use.

The future? I'm not sure. But right now I'm very happy.

Syndicated 2013-07-09 12:31:35 (Updated 2013-07-09 20:13:40) from Steve Kemp's Blog

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