libetpan 0.57 has been released.
This is for the needs of claws-mail.
Thanks to claws mail, releases of libetpan occur more often
I am also thinking about writing an API to produce messages more easily.
This will be based on the work done in etpanX. If you think about an API which is currently hard to use, just tell me.

For hype-ness purpose, I am writing this from my iPhone 3G, with wordpress iPhone application.

libetpan 0.56 has been released.
- better support for Client certificates
- bug fixes

it’s available for download.

What’s next ?
I am planning to produce an easier API to produce MIME format within the next release.
And of course, bugfixes. For example debian #498790.

1. Backup

I finally got a solution for incremental backups: rsync allow this. When synchronizing, there is an option to copy the files that will be modified or deleted to an other folder (creation of file is not tracked). Let’s call that folder the increment folder.

2. iPhone

These last days, I tried the iPhone.

a/ Cool things: - With this phone, we finally got rid of the PDA pen. Touchscreen user interface controls are finally the size of the finger. - The most interesting thing in that Phone was the SMS part: The SMS are classified by person and shown as a conversation.

3. etPanX

Implementation of filter backend is done and matches the description in my previous post. Still the configuration UI to create. Filtering is not blocking the user interface: that’s nice.

4. libetpan

Documentation of libetpan was a pain to maintain. It was static, in SGML. Nobody knew how to edit it. Nobody know how to build the HTML from the SGML.

5. Reading

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information – Edward Tufte

1. libetpan

There is some work available in the CVS :

2. PaperLess

A basic scanner application has been implemented for Mac OS X. This is called PaperLess. This will allow you to perform multiple-page document scan and save the document to PDF.

3. etpanX

etpanX is still in progress.

3.1. Account synchronization

An IMAP synchronization and POP synchronization has been implemented. Still some improvement is needed but user experience is now nearly a local access when reading mails in the IMAP account after the first synchronization with the IMAP server.

3.2. Filter

The implementation of filter is in progress. The plan for filter implementation is : - Filter will not block the user interface even if it takes some time. - Only messages from the main mailbox of a given account will be filtered. - Message that were not yet filtered will be hidden. - As soon as messages have been process, they will be visible.

4. Reading

Konrad Lorenz – Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour

1. Internet connection is back

I spent on holidays in vietnam: 3 weeks of February where I could get back to nature.

Just before I left France to Vietnam, my internet connection went down because of my provider or some intermediate. I took some time to get it back. I was reconnected yesterday.

2. gmail advertisement

While I was not connected, my mailbox hosted by my provider would reach the quota within a few days so that I had to move my mail to some place where I had some disk space. I remembered I opened some time ago a mailbox on gmail and gmail has now a feature to fetchmail the pop accounts. I tried it.
I think the main great feature of gmail was that ‘Archive’ button. Let me explain:
- there are 2 views of mailbox: inbox and all mails
- ‘inbox’ will show the messages that are NOT marked as ‘archived’
- ‘all mail’ will show all the messages
- ‘Archive’ button will mark the messages as ‘archived’ so that the messages will be hidden from ‘inbox’, the old messages won’t bother you any more in inbox and you can find them later in ‘all mails’
- Of course, you can sort the messages in ‘all mails’ using some feature called ‘tagging’ but I think this feature is more common to people. I will not give the details.

However, I am missing a better user interface than a web application.

3. RSS has been implemented in libEtPan!

Mostly based on libfeed of Andrej Kacian, libEtPan! has now an implementation of RSS. There is no article cache management yet. It would need some work.

By the way, to bring up again a google product, google reader is a great application to try. Currently, I could find no better RSS reader (or I don’t know a good RSS reader (I already tried NetNewsWire)).
4. etpanX is now committed on sourceforge

etpanX repository has moved on sourceforge.

https://libetpan.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/libetpan/etpanX/trunk

I am implementing IMAP synchronization in etpanX. And there is a lot of work involved. It has to be asynchonous (it should run in a thread different from the main thread), with a correct user feedback and it should provide a good responsiveness.

By the way, icons were provided by chandan.
5. XFCE

XFCE is the best user interface (window manager, application launcher) I could find on Linux. The window manager has almost the features of ctwm. The design of application, preferences panel are clean. They are not overcroweded with user interface elments. I did not even had to write a configuration file by hand. The file manager (Thunar) is  something better than what I could see previously. However, some solution has to be found to improve user interface of the file manager. I’d like to be able to have some shortcut to folders and I’d like to browse sub-folders easily (without switching between two modes).

1. etpanX
etpanX is now an application that mostly works. Filters still are missing to make it possible a release. For the filters it would need offline IMAP and POP retrieval to a local storage (that makes two To-Dos).

1.1. Message threads 

On user interface side, I worked on message threads. If you select a message on a thread, you will see that all the thread will be colored with a light blue to give a context of the thread. The current behavior is the following:
- selecting the main message of a closed thread will select all the thread
- expanding the main message will show all the thread
- selecting a message in an open thread will select only the message
- selecting several messages in an open thread will select the chosen messages
- selecting several message among several threads will select all the messages of both threads

Viewing a thread:

Selecting multiple thread:

1.2. message list abstraction

To be able to search messages across folders, I started to implement some message list abstraction at backend level. That’s a message list where we could add any message of any folders. That will allow the :
- standard view of the content of one folder
- search results
- virtual folders (a folder that will show results of a given search)

Each folder would feed the message list view so that the message list view can build a message thread with them. By this mean, we could, for example, include our replied messages into the message thread. So that the thread won’t be missing some messages.

A website for etpanX is now available. However, no download is available yet. Contact me if you want to preview etpanX application.

2. Address book application

Here is the list of application that exists to manage contacts.
Addresses
- that’s only for GNUStep environment.
- has inline editor but we need to click on ‘Edit’ to go in editor mode

kaddressbook
- editor for contact opens a new window
- search field is available in the main window

Evolution address book
- bloated application
- editor for contact opens a new window
- search field is available in the main window

Contacts
- editor for contact opens a new window
- search field is available in the main window

A nice standalone address book application would have the following feature :
- a list of groups.
- work in vCard format natively so that other applications can read its data.
Or that could export to vCard automatically.
- a searchable list of contacts using name, phone numbers, emails or other search type.
- view of the contact card.
- edition of each field should be enabled by activating the field. The field would change into an edition field so that the user could change the value.

3. Music

Listening to Textures and Sevendust.

1. Efficient search

An efficient search will avoid iterating through all the messages to search for something. For example a n-ary tree that will give the list of messages corresponding to a keyword can give an efficiency of O(length_of_keyword). I guess most indexing engine will build such a tree. Obviously, to avoid the user wait for the result, we have to build this tree before the user ask the search results. So that, we have to index as soon as possible. After fetching the list of messages, we will index the headers (subject, from field and recipient fields). That will correspond to most searches. Then, we will index the text content of the message. Less users will make this kind of searches but it remains useful.

2. Reuse existing components

Lucene has implemented this kind of indexer in Java. But etpanX is written in C language and Java is not that easy to interface with C. Lucene4c exists and has a C API but is mostly an abandonned software. Then, the last possible choice was CLucene, which has a C++ API. That made me write a glue between a C API for internal use of etpanX and C++ CLucene. An other possible choice could be Hyper Estraier but Lucene is more tested than the latter.

3. Regexp or not to regexp ?

Lucene won’t be able to work with regular expressions but basic users won’t understand what a regular expression is and even developers of system administrators have to make an effort to write a regular expression that will fit what they are searching. And in most case search by keyword will be sufficient.

4. Reading

That is not related to indexing algorithm though, the following are still interesting.

Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques
ISBN: 0133033899

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
ISBN: 0393315703

5. Music

Tool

Search field has been added. Reply and forward have been implemented. Preferences panel is implemented.

I am using icons from here.

a preview of etpanX is available at the following URL :

http://dinh.dyndns.org/~dinh/blog/etpanX-2006-01-02-bis.tar.gz

libetpan 0.42 preview will be needed for this :

http://dinh.dyndns.org/~dinh/blog/libetpan-0.42-pre.tar.gz

Reading and sending messages should be working.

The configuration files are the following :

to be placed in ~/.etpanX/account :

account [
        name "account-name"
        display-name "name-to-display-in-from-header"
        email "email-address"

        type "account-type" /* imap, pop, news, mbox, mh or maildir */

        /* IMAP, pop, news */

        hostname "hostname"
        port port-value
        tls tls-choice /* 1 or 0 */
        username "username"
        password "password"

        /* mbox, mh, maildir */

        path "/path/to/mailbox-list"

        /* SMTP */

        smtp-hostname "hostname"
        smtp-port port-value
        smtp-tls tls-choice /* 1 or 0 */
        smp-username "smtp username"
        smp-password "smtp password"
]

example :

— begin of example —

account [
        name "xxxx"
        type "imap"
        display-name "DINH Viet Hoa"
        email "xxxx@xxxx.com"
        hostname "imap.xxxx.com"
        port 143
        username "xxxx"
        password "xxxx"
        smtp-hostname "smtp.xxxx.com"
        smtp-port 25
]

account [
        name "News"
        type "news"
        display-name "DINH Viet Hoa"
        email "xxxx@xxxx.com"
        hostname "news.xxxx.com"
        username "xxxx"
        password "xxxx"
        smtp-hostname "smtp.xxxx.fr"
        smtp-port 25
]

— end of example —

to be placed in ~/.etpanX/abook :

abook [
        name "account-name"

        type "account-type" /* vcard or ldap */

        /* vcard, vcard file has to be in UTF-8 character set */

        path "/path/to/vcard-list"

        /* ldap */
        hostname "hostname"
        port port-value
        tls tls-choice /* 1 or 0 */
        username "username"
        password "password"
        base "ldap-base-request"
]

example :

— begin of example —

abook [
      name "personal"
      type "vcard"
      path "/Users/xxxx/xxxx.vcf"
]

abook [
      name "xxxx"
      type "ldap"
      hostname "ldap.xxxx.com"
      port 389
      base "ou=yyyy,o=xxxx"
      tls 0
]

— end of example —