[Edbrowse-dev] mailx

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

Usually I refrain from commenting about other systems, other worlds,
because I've never used them.
Never touched windows, or gnome, or kde, or firefox,
or speakup, or just about anything else; I live in my own little world.
But aha, I did use mailx.
It must have been nearly 30 years ago at bell labs.
I liked it, and could still use it, but it entails a 2 pass process.
I pulled mail down, and perhaps stored it,
but then later I had to do more things with my emails.
I wrote edbrowse to be an integrated system.
Each email I can delete, or store, and put this attachment here,
and throw that attachment away because it's just an image, and so on.
One pass and I manage all the new emails and I'm done.
That's why I typically have 6 emails pending, while my wife has 2000.
As a side benefit, the rendered email looks just like it would
if I edited the email later, in edbrowse, and browsed.
This is more and more important as almost all emails
are in html.
So the first time I see it, when I'm wondering what to do with it,
or even if I should keep it at all,
it has the familiar braces and formatting of an edbrowse page,
just like it will the next time I see it.
All these points are small, and yet they're not small in that I
fetch mail dozens of times a day and would like it to be ultra
efficient and convenient.
Even though I liked mailx, I will never go back to it.
With that in mind, I think a simple version of imap could be done in a few hundred lines of code,
with no structural changes and no negative immpact to edbrowse,
if you never used imap it would never bother you, etc,
and I could use it in a simple manner if I wished.
The day may come when large mail servers only offer imap or exchange, no pop3 available.
gmail for example still offers pop3 but I had to go
into the settings section and set it up, because it is not
available by default.
So I may some day have to forget edbrowse as a mail client or support some level of imap,
and this may be what others are seeing,
and thus I would like a little bit of imap to work.
Chris you said it looked a little more involved than you had hoped;
if you don't want to mess with it I can look into it,
but I would need to know where you get all this cool information about 
curl development. It's probably a thick manual, hopefully with examples.
I'm thinking we should at least, as a first step,
call the inner mail management routine that we already wrote,
on the inbox folder, and get a feel for how that works.
We could then build from there if we like it,
or discard the effort if we don't.

Karl Dahlke