Re: Possibility of plugin for Mozilla/Thunderbird?

Eric S. Johansson <esj <at> harvee.org> writes:

> frequently plug-ins do not give you the right kind of control to do "the 
> right thing".  The ones I have looked at do not let you create 
> background processing so users don't need to see stamp generation.
> 
> here are two alternatives which are really the same thing with different 
> coupling logic.  The first and simplest is to take any of the stamping 
> tools and make them run under Windows via a proxy.  Personally (tooting 
> my own horn), I have done this already with parts of camram and it works 
> quite nicely.  It would be interesting to play with camram 0.4.<dammit I 
> found another bug> and build a client side stamping engine.
> 
> the next challenge would be to do the same thing on the pop 3 side 
> although that is somewhat more amenable to plug-ins since it isn't 
> necessarily real-time.  Camram would be a bit of overkill there but not 
> unrealistically so if you want to go down that path.  Your big challenge 
> would be making crm114 work on Windows.
> 
> the variant once you have the basic proxy systems working would be to 
> use the Windows tcp stack interception code to redirect connection 
> traffic to these filters.
> 
> I'm not intending to discourage, I just want you to know a little 
> something about the terrain.  If you want to do the camram route, I will 
> be glad to give you some help.
> 
> ---eric

I'll look into the size of the problem, although I doubt that I would do much
more, at least /initially/ than just the client side.  I have almost no Windows
experience (sorry if I gave a different impression), so I'd choose to implement
a mozilla widget, which would at least approach a solution to the problem
that I came up against.  As I've done no non-trivial programming for a couple
of years, and little for several years, it'll take a while.

My reason for mentioning Outlook was that I was imagining the point at which
it would be reasonable for some organisations to /require/ Hardcash.  This is
looking into the future.

Thank-you for your offer of help, though, but I don't have the confidence for
the larger task that you paint, as least not right away.  If I feel like taking
the Mozilla toolbar on after looking at what it would involve, I'll let this
group know.

Sincerely,

Tim Wesson.