GopherMail Development

Last week saw finalization of a framework for "web services" in Gophermail, and a proof-of-concept that lets you fetch the the newest N messages for a user who is currently logged into CAH.

Today IMAP searches have received a similar treatment. Remember that all details here are preliminary and subject to change, but here's the outline. A url such as:

gophermail.umn.edu/search?status_op=unseen

will return all unread messages. 'date_op' will be available for date-based searches, 'text_op' for text, etc. The current "proof" for this is a toggle on the message list page to show only unread messages. That may or may not be something that would get enough use to justify taking up space on the app's main interface. Have to evaluate that going forward. Details matter, lack of distraction matters, and anything that doesn't really need to be at the fingertips shouldn't be.

Posted by Brian Hayden at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, as of this afternoon there is a functional proof-of-concept that exposes the IMAP message list as a web service.

Querying a url (which will likely end up being something like gophermail.umn.edu/recent?range=X) will give you an XML doc that contains the most recent X (in range=X) number of messages for the username that is currently logged into UMN Central Auth Hub in that browser. Likely representation will be something like arrival time, sender, and subject, and a url to jump into viewing that message in Gophermail.

This has been something that's been requested for MyU, among other things. Looks like it will be do-able.

Posted by Brian Hayden at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

International character support (via UTF-8) has been added to today's GopherMail 2.0 test build and has passed early checks. This was a piece of spam I happened to have in my Inbox and I have no idea what it says, if it's vulgar, let me know and I'll switch it out for something else:

EDIT: I've been informed that this was indeed some NC-17 spam :) , so I have two new examples. One is Japanese from the administrative info on the FreeBSD mailing list archives website; the other is Greek Ministry of Tourism transport info. Both were sent and then received in Gophermail 2.0.

More to come....

Posted by Brian Hayden at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)