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I won't write another email client

8 January 2020 19:19

Once upon a time I wrote an email client, in a combination of C++ and Lua.

Later I realized it was flawed, and because I hadn't realized that writing email clients is hard I decided to write it anew (again in C++ and Lua).

Nowadays I do realize how hard writing email clients is, so I'm not going to do that again. But still .. but still ..

I was doing some mail-searching recently and realized I wanted to write something that processed all the messages in a Maildir folder. Imagine I wanted to run:

 message-dump ~/Maildir/people-foo/ ~/Maildir/people-bar/  \
     --format '${flags} ${filename} ${subject}'

As this required access to (arbitrary) headers I had to read, parse, and process each message. It was slow, but it wasn't that slow. The second time I ran it, even after adjusting the format-string, it was nice and fast because buffer-caches rock.

Anyway after that I wanted to write a script to dump the list of folders (because I store them recursively so ls -1 ~/Maildir wasn't enough):

 maildir-dump --format '${unread}/${total} ${path}'

I guess you can see where this is going now! If you have the following three primitives, you have a mail-client (albeit read-only)

  • List "folders"
  • List "messages"
  • List a single message.

So I hacked up a simple client that would have a sub-command for each one of these tasks. I figured somebody else could actually use that, be a little retro, be a little cool, pretend they were using MH. Of course I'd have to write something horrid as a bash-script to prove it worked - probably using dialog to drive it.

And then I got interested. The end result is a single golang binary that will either:

  • List maildirs, with a cute format string.
  • List messages, with a cute format string.
  • List a single message, decoding the RFC2047 headers, showing text/plain, etc.
  • AND ALSO USE ITSELF TO PROVIDE A GUI

And now I wonder, am I crazy? Is writing an email client hard? I can't remember

Probably best to forget the GUI exists. Probably best to keep it a couple of standalone sub-commands for "scripting email stuff".

But still .. but still ..

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