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

From: Scott Klement <klemscot@klements.com>

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?

> 90% of my e-mail is plain text.  9% are attachments I save.  1% have imbedded 
>pictures.
> A green screen app could handle 90% of my mail no problem.  An additional 9% 
>of my e-mail
> if it had the option to save attachments.  So for that 1% I couldn't open up 
>the spam I
> get that I get embarrassed when someone walks by seeing a picture of some 
>"barely legal"
> picture I didn't want to see in the first place.

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.

> This would work in, what, 50% of the time if that?  A lot of SMTP clients 
>will say an
> e-mail address is okay as long as it's to that domain.  They usually don't 
>check for a
> valid user name anymore.

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)

> Not that hard at all.  Sometimes I will check my POP3 mail telnetting to 25 
>directly.  Not
> real clean, but I can get the gist of info.

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.

> Shouldn't be that hard, actually.  Just a bit of prettying up the text a 
>little bit.  And
> having an option to save attachments.

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.

> Who needs HTML anyway?  The plain text version should be fine.

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.

> I've also thought about doing this same project, but was wondering how much 
>of a need there
> is, since there are already some pay e-mail clients available on the AS/400.

Regards,

Jim Langston