Platemail News
Thursday, September 22, 2005
IMAP, finally:
It has been quite a while coming, but this week I merged my IMAP code back into the main Platemail trunk. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that in implementing the IMAP support I hadn't even broken the POP3 code, which I don't think has been tested for almost a year. I've almost finished adding support for persistence now, so that things like mail account settings survive across Platemail sessions.Although all of this is only running properly with the console interface (I haven't updated the GUI code lately) it is starting to behave something like a proper email client. Admittedly, you still can't send email, but I'm hoping that adding that should be fairly trivial.
Looking forward a bit, I had a play with some scripting engines that can be embedded into a Java app; in particular Jython and Jakarta BSF. The plan is to add support for plugins at various stages (message filtering, sorting, automated replies and forwarding, etc), and these plugins could take the form of simple scripts or full Java tools. This should afford a fair amount of power to extend Platemail in various different ways while keeping the core fairly simple. This is very much the approach that applications like jEdit take, and it seems to work pretty well.
posted by Neil Campbell 8:56 PM
