I’ve had no time at all to work on a beta release of Blog since I’ve been devoting all of my time to working on PostMan – the e-mail client that I’ve been writing. It’s progressing pretty fast since so far I’ve got basic POP access working great! It’ll check multiple e-mail accounts, display both text and HTML messages and process attachments. I don’t have support for different mailboxes at the moment and so everything goes into the “In” box and there is no filtering capability yet but other than that, it works pretty well as a POP client. Since I use a different HTML engine than IE’s, there is no fear of scripted viruses (scripting is not supported by the HTML engine I use) and since the mail client can be configured to fetch either the whole e-mail or just the headers, you don’t even have to download huge e-mails full of spam – instead you can just look at the header, figure out if it is necessary or not and then delete what you don’t need off the server itself and download the rest.
So what doesn’t work? The SMTP client :p I spent the last few days on perfecting the POP client and have just started working on the SMTP client bit and so far am having problems with getting the address completion to work for e-mail addresses in the address book. Once I get that part done, the rest should be fairly straightforward. I intend to add the option for direct SMTP so that you don’t need an SMTP server at this end as long as you know the IP of your DNS server – PostMan will discover the mail server for the destination address and send it directly there. This is something that I’ve wanted for a long time and I even intended to write a separate SMTP server component for just this purpose but bundling it into the e-mail client makes much better sense since then you can have two profiles – one for local SMTP and one ofr direct SMTP since I intend to make the feature, a per-profile one.
Once all that gets done, I will have a basic e-mail client but without all the frills like being able to create extra folders, filters or to import the addresses and e-mails from a different client. Oh yeah, and the ability to set PostMan as the default e-mail client. I guess I can work on those after I get the basic functionality working. I already want this client since I don’t have the problem of getting random “=20” insertions in the middle of my e-mails as I do with Eudora but I don’t know whether I’ll start using this without the ability to import my older e-mails. Guess I’ll have to complete work on PostMan and then see how things turn out …