Re: curse python mailer

Benjamin Sergeant writes:
> Follwing this post:
> http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2006-November/000441.html
> 
> I just gave a try to the emailer and am very interested in it. I am a
> pine user that would like to hook some more features, and hacking old
> C code from pine does not look like a cool option.

That's great!  I'm glad it's turning out to be useful to more than
just me.

I think pine additionally has the problem of the dispute about its
legal status.

I haven't been using it for the last couple of months because somebody
privatized my laptop while I was sitting in a café, so I've been using
my wife's --- but it doesn't have space for my current mailbox.
That's one reason I'm so far behind on my mail :)

> I created a project on google hosting about that:
> http://code.google.com/p/bine/

Cool!

> With some features or thought on an email client I'd like:
>  * LDAP
>  * easy gpg signing
>  * using an external editor
>  * better bogofilter integration
>  * send mail from command line (like sendmail)
>  * integrated smtp
>  * unicode handling
>  * contact completion (a la bash)

Those would all be awesome; the external editor and contact completion
are probably things I would use myself.  I did write some unicode
handling for it, which I think was probably in the version you looked
at, but I guess you had something additional in mind?

> Also I wasn't able to start the emacs composer that you are talking
> about.

Oh, the "r" command dumps draft replies into the file "tmp.replies",
delimited with ~m and ~e sequences, for use with some other
very-low-rent mail infrastructure I use (basically to avoid the hassle
that is SMTP these days).  I just edit the outgoing mail batch in
fundamental-mode in Emacs.

I'd really like to have a better way of doing replies, but I also
really like that all my outgoing mail is in a single Emacs buffer
(within a single batch, I mean).

> And my terminal is an iso-latin so some characters have a bad look
> (convert to unicode ?)

Well, I think non-UTF-8 encodings are evil, since they create the
necessity for encoding conversions, but I recognize that not everybody
agrees with me :)

It should probably be fairly straightforward to change the recoding
from utf-8 to iso-latin-1 or whatever you use.  Maybe it could be set
from some environment variables?

> A cool feature would also be to span a program associated with the
> attachment mime type when parsing attachments.
> For HTML mails, one solution may be to use lynx -dump.

Yeah, for my own use I mostly just want to save the files, but maybe
that wouldn't be such a bad idea in general.

> And I'd also wonder if your program could switch from one mailbox to
> another, by hitting the left arrow one more time from the thread mode.

I'd like to be able to display mail from multiple mailboxes all
together in the same screen, actually, so I can search through all of
it at once, and see mail I sent and mail I received all together ---
no doubt you know the value of this feature from using Gmail.

> In his main
>    signal.signal(signal.SIGWINCH, self.handler_resize)
> 
> With this handler:
>    def handler_resize(self, sig, frame):
>         # curses trickery
>         while 1:
>             try: curses.endwin(); break
>             except: time.sleep(1)
>         self.w.refresh()
>         self.win_root.resize()
>         self.win_root.update()
> 
> Maybe it can help.

Awesome!  Thanks!  I think it will.

> I see that you are using darcs, is there a way to clone your
> repository if I want to try to work on your code.

Um, I'm not sure if I've put it on the web yet!  Stupid oversight.  As
you probably already know, "darcs get URL" will clone a repository
that's on the web.  I guess I will put it at
http://pobox.com/~kragen/sw/repos/cursmail/ --- any suggestions for a
cleverer name?