etpanX, Address book

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.

etpanX work

1. etpanX
I am back working on etpanX.

1.1. message viewer
- message viewer is mostly finished, text/html (lynx will be called to convert the content to text) and text/enriched can be viewed.
- attachment can be downloaded or opened.

TODO :
- show a list of non-visible attachment
- don’t show the entire list of recipient if it is too long

1.2 message list
- contextual menu has been implemented.
- ‘mark messages’ is not yet implemented.

TODO :
- message are not expunged yet
- option are not greyed out when needed

1.3. folder list
- progress indicator is on the folder list

TODO :
- mark folder as read
- contextual menu needs to be implemented

1.4. preferences
This part is a work-in-progress.

1.5. general
- drag & drop, filtering and spam filters are not yet implement

2. libetpan
An error has been done in libtool versioning of libetpan. This will be fixed in next release.

3. music
Listening to Sikth, Dredg, Static X.
DVD of Killswitch Engage is out.

4. books
Reading The Logic of Scientific Discovery — Karl R. Popper.
ISBN: 0415278449

libetpan 0.41

is out (as requested for sylpheed-claws)

1. libetpan
As requested by users, passphrase has been implemented in libetpan 0.41 (though, passphrase prompting is not yet implemented in etpan).
This also fixes a clash of symbols when libetpan was linked with GnuTLS and sylpheed-claws linked with OpenSSL.
sylpheed-claws was calling initialization of OpenSSL, then libetpan was thinking that initialization of GnuTLS was already called, then was making the calls to GnuTLS (through OpenSSL compatibility interface) without initialization.
That made the things crash.
The prefered solution was to use GnuTLS specific API when libetpan was compiled with GnuTLS.

2. music
- Steve Stevens (guitarist of Billy Idol)
- Al Di Meola
- Yes

libetpan 0.40

… is released (as requested for sylpheed-claws).

1. libetpan
avoid initialization of OpenSSL when initialization is already done by the user program.

2. music
went to Steve Vai concert, but also Soilwork.

libetpan 0.39

… is released (as requested for sylpheed-claws).

1. libetpan
high-level API for SASL (CRAM-MD5 and other strange kind of authentication).
compatibility with GnuTLS is improved.

2. music
went at Opeth concert.
planned to go to Pain of Salvation concert.

3. books
read traité d’athélogie (french only).

4. other oddities
Well, how long mean nerds/geeks/hackers work for open source …?

SASL

1. libetpan

I am working on SASL for libetpan. Cyrus-SASL will be used.
That will bring some numbers of authentication mechanism for IMAP4, POP3 and SMTP : ANONYMOUS, CRAM-MD5, PLAIN, GSSAPI (MIT Kerberos 5 or Heimdal Kerberos 5), DIGEST-MD5, LOGIN, SRP, NTLM, OTP, KERBEROS_V4.
Implementation will be started with IMAP4.

some addition of API (mainly authentication API) will be needed since SASL authentication
needs the server full qualified name, a login, an authentication name, a password, and a realm name (kerberos meaning).

2. music

listening to Meshuggah.
Opeth to be on tour in Paris on september.

workaround old Courier IMAP bug

1. Courier IMAP nightmare is back once again.
A workaround has to be applied in sylpheed to workaround a bug in old Courier IMAP servers.
if we quote atom such as “Reply-To”, the server won’t understand the command.

It looks like (in opposition to what I said earlier) we could fix that by not quoting words with ‘-’ char. (1)
The workaround that has been applied is fetching all headers instead of performing a fetching a selection of headers.

Maybe I’ll workaround this also in libetpan by using (1).

2. music
listening to Spineshank.

3. books (french)
“Vacances dans le coma” – Frederic Beigbeder – ISBN 2253140708.
“XY, de l’identité masculine” – Elisabeth Badinter – ISBN 2253097837. english version : “XY, on masculine identity” – ISBN 0231084358

sylpheed new IMAP implemented

1. sylpheed
A pre-version of sylpheed with a new IMAP implementation has been snapshoted a fed to users for torture.
This currently basically implements the same thing with a better parser and IMAP command sender.
Every IMAP request are run in an IMAP thread (one thread per IMAP server).
This implementation introduced two regressions :
- NAMESPACE is no more implemented
- CRAM-MD5 authentication is no more implemented, LOGIN will always be used.
(were people really using those ?)

2. libetpan
This work let me find a bug in unused parts of libetpan low-level implementation of IMAP. This is fixed with libetpan-0.36cvs18.

3. music
- listening to Atreyu (metal) and Maxeen (rock), Killswitch Engage (metal) , Porcupine Tree (progressive rock).
- went to Iron Maiden concert.

4. conclusion
Let’s wait users feedback and commit to main sylpheed-gtk2 branch.
Then, go back on dev of etpanX.

here the main view :

here the message composer :