Re: [Edbrowse-dev] mailx

[Adam Thompson <arthompson1990@gmail.com>]

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On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 01:19:50PM -0400, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> 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.

I think that the heirloom-mailx version can do all these things since it
supports every mail protocol I can think of.
I'm going to investigate this since I rather like the interface and often end
up wanting to edit email by sshing into a remote machine and ed-like
interfaces just work better over slow connections in my opinion.

> 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.

Yeah I can see that being quite nice;
though you could just use the mailcap mechanism to do this of course.

> 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.

I guess I'm just a litle worried about bloat as the browsing side of edbrowse
gets progressively larger in order to keep up with the modern internet.
In addition, there are many features we simply don't have in edbrowse,
I'm not sure exactly what the mail support is,
but for vague parity with modern clients we really need:
imap (with imaps and starttls support),
pop3 (with ssl and tls support),
mbox and maildir support (for local mail),
support for pgp (and for some people s/mime support as well),
Correct threading header support (currently it doesn't work correctly, at least from what I can see in the mail headers in emails I receive from you),
Mailcap support of some kind (potentially our plugin system may be able to do
this but it should probably be integrated),
Probably a bunch of other stuff I've never used.

I'm not saying we can't do this in edbrowse, but I wonder if it's time for an edmail program?

If we modularise the buffer and command parsing interface we could have an ed
suite, with edmail, edbrowse, edtext and (if you want) eddb and edspread.
This would make things quite a lot nicer to work on I suspect,
whilst also making adding new programs (e.g. edspread) that much easier.
There are also other projects where I'd quite like the buffer and command
parsing (and readline) stuff from edbrowse.
A hex editor would be one which would be quite nice to investigate.

Cheers,
Adam.

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