[9fans] pop3 client

[9fans] pop3 client

[forsyth]

>>it would be to port to Plan 9.  It delivers the mail by connecting
>>to port 25 of the local machine, so you'ld need to be running
>>smtpd, and you'ld need David Butler's loopback device to get 127.>>0.0.1.

alternatively, just pipe: cat /bin/service/tcp25 and follow instructions,
for the far end of the pipe.

[9fans] pop3 client

[Russ]

Actually a generic mail file system interface would
be more in the spirit.  Have a mailfs that talks Plan9 (Unix)
mail boxes, have a separate one that does POP3, have another
that does IMAP, etc.

I'm actually working on a generic library to make
writing 9P servers even less painless; POP3 is on the
list of things to do.  Should be done in a month or two.

Russ

[9fans] pop3 client

[Scott]

Actually fetchmail has an option to run the delivery agent of your
choice.  tcp25 is just the default.

Drifting away from pop for a moment, a 9p interface to imap would be
somewhat more interesting, as well as more in the plan9 spirit.

[9fans] pop3 client

[Russ]

There's a pop3 client I wrote and used for a while a year ago
at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/~rsc/pop3get.c

It's somewhat rough, but if you're willing to spend a little
time hacking at it it's probably fairly usable.

The invocation was something like
	pop3get -drN maxsize -s secretfile server 

-d deletes the messages when done.  if you don't delete, you'll
get the same messages next time.

-r reads the mail box in reverse order; you won't need this flag.
-N max sets a maximum message size to download. 
-s secretfile reads a password from file.

pop3get downloads the mail and then runs upas/sendmail to
deliver it to the local user.

There are references to MD5 routines from a non-existant
<libcrypt.h> to do challenge-response authentication.
If all you want is password, just comment out the MD5 calls and
specify the -p flag to use plaintext passwords.
If you want challenge-response, you can probably pull the
appropriate MD5 code from /sys/src/cmd/md5sum.c

Finally, you'll see that the sendmail call calls
upas/mysendmail and not upas/sendmail.
I think the difference was that mysendmail pulled
the sender from the From: line if there was no
Unix-style From line; that was some bit of ugliness
I never got around.  I don't remember.

Like I said, it's a little rough in places, but it's a start.
I'ld be interested in any changes.

An alternative place to look would be Eric Raymond's fetchmail,
which does a functionally similar thing; I don't know how hard
it would be to port to Plan 9.  It delivers the mail by connecting
to port 25 of the local machine, so you'ld need to be running
smtpd, and you'ld need David Butler's loopback device to get 127.0.0.1.

Russ

[9fans] pop3 client

[pat]

I would like to access mail on a unix server
running pop3 from my plan9 system without having to
'con' to a unix host. Any suggestions? Is there a
pop3 client up and running in plan9 which integrates
to upas?

Thanks for the help.

Pat

reply-to: pat.hacker@tek.com