Re: [OSS400] Re: *** ADMIN: Spam (Open Source Green Screen Email)

(sorry, this reply is about a week after the original post... but I
finally had some time to think... heh)

I've written a few e-mail clients... one of which was even for the AS/400.
Unfortunately, the source doesn't belong to me, and I can't post it.

However, I was wondering:  Is this something that people could really use?
I mean, most people are very adamant about using graphical e-mail readers
like Outlook, etc.  Would it really be that useful to write a green screen
app?

The checking an e-mail address wouldn't be that bad... though, you can't
FULLY check an e-mail address, all you can do is check the domain with
DNS and then you can TRY to check the recipient with SMTP, but that's not
completely reliable.  Still, it's not really that hard.

And, sending & receiving mail using SMTP and POP3 isn't that hard, either.
(I prefer to use those protocols directly instead of using the IBM APIs
because then the e-mail client can use a different machine as it's POP3
and/or SMTP server, rather than forcing you to run those services on the
local machine)

However, when you get into parsing the body of the messages so that the
user can read them on the screen, things start to get difficult.  It would
be a REALLY BIG project to make it all work.

In the AS/400 client I wrote, it would parse the MIME headers, and decode
Base64 & Quoted-Printable attachments to files in the IFS.  However, it
did not parse HTML text.  It could not display pictures, etc.   Because of
that, the users greatly prefer to have a graphical client.

Still, if other people are really interested, I'll contribute some code to
the project when I have time, and provide guidance where I can.


On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, John Ross wrote:

> If any one wanted to write an Open source green screen email client that
> check if an address was valid. They could use
> http://www.netshare400.com/cgi-bin/DSPOPNSRC?file=QRPGLESRC&mbr=CHKEMADR
> http://www.netshare400.com/cgi-bin/DSPOPNSRC?file=QRPGLESRC&mbr=GETMXRCD
> http://www.netshare400.com/cgi-bin/DSPOPNSRC?file=QRPGLESRC&mbr=CHKEADR
>
> http://klement.dstorm.net/rpg/socktut/index.html
>
> I am willing to help and GIVE access to an AS/400.
>
> John Ross
> www.opensource400.org
>