Re: Homemade email system using LuaSocket and LuaPOP3

[Louis Mamakos <louie@...>]

On Sep 20, 2011, at 4:45 PM, Stefan Reich wrote:

> I'd just like to add that this is an interesting discussion to come up just now.
> 
> I was - or actually, I still am - considering writing an email client
> as one of the first real-world Lua OS apps.
> 
> If someone has working Lua code for the non-UI part (POP3/message
> parsing), I'll be glad to port that to Safe Lua, add a little GUI
> and... voila: world domination.
> 
> -Stefan
> 

Many years ago, I crawled around the inside of MH and NMH; it might be worth 
looking at that code to see what can be reused for the grunt work of parsing
messages, etc.  As I recall, the code was partitioned into a subroutine library
distinct from the dozen or so user programs for manipulating local folders.

The message parsing code was quite robust, having been tested by time, and
pretty well optimized since the code spent most of it's time puzzling over
RFC-822-style headers, and more so with MIME body parts.  You don't want to
learn all those lessons the hard way, again.

Of course, MH/NMH (at least back then) didn't speak network, so you're still 
left with that problem.

Louis Mamakos