on the topic of eMails (was Re: 1st time Revolution user question)

[Andre Garzia]

On Jul 14, 2005, at 2:59 PM, Alcy wrote:

>
> What are my options to send and receive emails with a Revolution  
> stack?
>
> Thanks
> Alcy

Hi There Alcy,

this will be a big email. I promisse I'll try to keep it small and  
direct without my constant ramblings about my newtons and embedding  
webservers in any appliances that plug into power sockets :-D

There are many ways one can send emails. Some are nothing but big  
hacks, others are more elegant and professional tools. I will be  
listing things here by memory, so I might get something wrong. In the  
end of the email I'll try to sum up some URLs for your pleasure and  
amusement. Let us begin talking about "what is email anyway!?"

Okay, Everyone wants to send email! but what are you calling email?  
The category division I am making here is in no way academic but  
you'll see my point. Let's assume that there are two kinds of email,  
plain text ones and "HTML Plus Attachments" ones. What do you want to  
use? The thing is, the html and/or attachment one will need to deal  
with MIME Generating part, and this is not hard but it's very boring  
and sometimes masoquism (hey, I can have mime boundaries inside mime  
boundaries inside mime boun...)

so let us talk about solutions. I'll begin with the best one I can  
remember which is:

     (1) Shao Sean libEmail and libSMTP libraries. Shao Sean created  
this two gems that can to lots of cool things. The libEmail will  
generate an email enclosure (will not send, but generate the chunk  
that is the email) with MIME, Attachments and whatever you want.  
libSMTP will take care of sending the email. It works fine!
     (2) My own Raw SMTP stack. I use Shao Sean works but sometimes  
you stumble on the following scenario. You want to send an email, but  
you don't have the senders configuration and configuring it is too  
much, how do you work this out? If you can't think how this can  
happen, let us think of a software that will report back falliures to  
a central using eMail. Do you really need the client to enter his  
email configuration, will the client like this or find this too  
invasive? You just need the report. So what I did was to create a  
stack that will use SMTP to talk directly to the receiver SMTP server  
and deliver the email. Let us clarify: Sending an email usually works  
like this, your mail program talk to your SMTP server, your SMTP  
server talks to the destination SMTP server and deliver the thing. I  
skipped the first part, so we don't need the client configuration. It  
works fine for some cases. Some servers will make a reverse check to  
see if the stack is actually a SMTP server, and if it is not, will  
think that our beautifull stack is actually some spam server or relay  
agent and will block the email. It depends on the server but since I  
create that for uses like reporting tools and feedback, you just need  
to make sure that the report email actually loves our stack.
     (3) Are you on a unix environment (linux, *bsd, MacOS X)? Then  
use sendmail. Sendmail is a tool bundled with all unix I know about,  
and it can send email from the command line. Just wrap your email on  
a nice chunk and send it using the shell() command and sendmail tool.
     (4) RevMail command, this will not send the email but open the  
users default email app with your email in it. It works but sometimes  
feel like a  not elegant solution.
     (5) Are you on macos classic or macos x? AppleScript to the  
rescue!!! Use applescript to send the email for you, you can script  
mail.app or the terminal. It works very fine.
     (6) create your own email sending tool! read the RFCs and go for  
it, one learns so much by reinventing the wheel (I am serious), you  
might go with one of the above solutions but in your spare time,  
pursuing this solution will teach you much more about email and  
sockets then you'd ever learn by simply using high level tools.

Now the reading email part... err... I never done this, I like  
sending mails, not reading them :-) I can think two ways only!

     (1) I do think Sarah created a libPOP library that can do POP3  
reading. and I think someone on the list actually used this on a spam  
filter.
     (2) Let the client default app fetch the mails, parse the mbox  
file. There are two standards for storing emails, mbox and maildir.  
Both are easy to parse.


     Most of the solutions quoted here are available thru RevOnline.
     Shao Sean site moved and I don't know the new address, but it  
used to be at shaosean.tk
     Sarah page is: http://www.troz.net/Rev/index.html


Cheers happy mailing
andre



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