This weekend I started working on upgrading Hep's messaging library.  My goal is to end up with a nice abstraction layer for working with messages, that will be useful for other projects as well as Hep.  As part of this I'm splitting all the file-format bits (that deal with reading and writing RSS/mailbox/text/html files) into a seperate "parsers" library that doesn't required Twisted or dealing with events.  So hopefully that might be useful for somebody.

Once the library is upgrade is done (and it's coming along quite well already), it should be possible to add NNTP support to Hep in just a few hours (thanks to Twisted's excellent news module).

I finally took the time to write down most of my thoughts on what Hep is, where it is now, and where it's going. Hopefully I'll get some response from this - I want to get the word out about Hep and see what people think.

Hep 0.3.1 is out.

Changes from Hep 0.3:

• The web view of mailboxes is much nicer (Thanks to David Dorward for his suggestions and patches).
• A potentially nasty bug in the message-delivery module was fixed.  Under unusual circumstances Hep would incorrectly think that it handn't delivered a message, and deliver the same message over and over.
• RSS handling is improved, with support for guid and content:encoded (Patches from Wari Wahab).

Wari is connecting Hep to his fetchmail/procmail/postfix setup, and documenting it all on his site:

Some Tips and Tricks for using Hep with Postfix

How to use Hep to deliver messages to your weblog, while still using Postfix to deliver e-mail.

How to use procmail, fetchmail, and Hep to monitor a mailbox and post any messages sent there to a weblog.

I'm happy to announce that Hep 0.3 is up for download.

This release of Hep lets you use your favorite e-mail program to post weblog entries.  Supported weblog systems are Blogger, BloggerAPI, MetaWeblogAPI, and Virgule (Advogato-type diaries).  As in previous releases, Hep also fetches messages from RSS feeds and Virgule diaries and converts them to e-mail.

It's been a few months since my last release of Hep.  In that time I've done a lot of work on Hep's core architecture, most notably converting all the networking stuff to use Twisted.  If you're interested in getting involved with the development of Hep, now is a good time to do it.  Grab the release, try it out, report bugs.

To make it easier for other people to get involved, I've created a project (called hepserver) on SourceForge.  The code is in CVS.  There's also a mailing list for developers.