I feel like I might be taking this more seriously than the author intended but:
Are there many mail clients that speak POP3 but not IMAP4? IMAP was standardised at around the time the Internet was opened to non-academic, non-government connections. Most of the older mail clients that I remember spoke weird and wonderful proprietary protocols.
It feels like IMAP would be a good choice for this, since it’s authenticated and can handle both posting, threaded replies, and so on. Even in-place editing.
NNTP is an even older protocol and is very simple (I wrote a client in about 100 lines of C) and the model for NNTP is quite similar to ActivityPub (multiple servers, can post on your own, your posts are pushed to other servers, comments are threaded).
An AP to NNTP gateway would be cool (although I don’t think I have access to any textual NNTP servers any more) - could even add the reverse and use Usenet as a transport mechanism.
It feels like IMAP would be a good choice for this
From what I know, IMAP is a complex spec with a million gotchas that everyone implements slightly differently. POP3/NNTP are things you can lash up without going insane.
Years ago, I hacked together a NNTP gateway to Drupal. It reads articles and comments from the Drupal database and publishes them over NNTP. Posting new comments through this protocol is also possible.
I’ve written a lobsters/reddit to NNTP proxy prototype (with posting support), but it quickly turned out that POP3/NNTP is not an ideal protocol for this, IMAP would be better; core reason is that NNTP doesn’t support syncing between multiple machines, and IMAP does support it.
So I’m a little bit sad that MOP3 is not MIMAP.
Although it’s true that one can create another layer with dovecot+fetchmail that would convert nntp/pop3 to imap. But this starts to be somewhat complicated.
Oh yes, I forgot: I wrote a Lobsters to NNTP adapter a while back. I would not call NNTP simple - between the statefulness, MIME, and keeping a mapping between article IDs (which must be linear and monotonic) and your actual representation, it can be quite tricky to do right.
Modern (past 15 years or so) GUI mail clients almost certainly speak IMAP.
But terminal clients are probably another story – many of them historically have been developed by people who roll their eyes and sigh and re-explain “this is an MUA” over and over when asked about features like accessing mail stored on a remote server. Admittedly this was years and years ago, but the last time I tried mutt, even it didn’t have IMAP support and seemed like it had only grudgingly supported POP3.
Are there many mail clients that speak POP3 but not IMAP4? IMAP was standardised at around the time the Internet was opened to non-academic, non-government connections. Most of the older mail clients that I remember spoke weird and wonderful proprietary protocols.
A lot of 90s mail clients before ~1998 didn’t speak IMAP - POP was much more popular then, and did map to how dialup users used email.
I want to get my friends’ post into folders with their names on them. It would be more like a messaging app than twitter-style firehose, but I could use the email client that’s accessible to me.
Might be something that could be implemented as a Dovecot storage plugin to save a lot of the IMAP implementation hassle (obviously with something else putting the AP stuff into the storage.)
I’ve been tinkering with something like this (no usable code yet) with the end goal of having an Emacs-based threaded discussion view comparable to what notmuch.el and Gnus provide so it would have to deal with fetching threads referenced by messages in the direct feeds.
The approaches I’ve been considering:
Delivery to maildir, similar to rss2email. This would have the advantage of being usable with anything that can handle maildir including notmuch.
Creating a command that emulates the notmuch cli and protocol, to be utilized by notmuch.el. This would allow for custom queries and on-demand interaction instead of periodic polling.
an NNTP gateway to be used with Gnus
an nnmastodon.el plugin for Gnus
But in the meanwhile mastodon.el has been working quite well.
Another neat tool I’ve been using is bitlbee-mastodon which is a way to have an IRC based frontend to Mastodon.
I feel like I might be taking this more seriously than the author intended but:
Are there many mail clients that speak POP3 but not IMAP4? IMAP was standardised at around the time the Internet was opened to non-academic, non-government connections. Most of the older mail clients that I remember spoke weird and wonderful proprietary protocols.
It feels like IMAP would be a good choice for this, since it’s authenticated and can handle both posting, threaded replies, and so on. Even in-place editing.
NNTP is an even older protocol and is very simple (I wrote a client in about 100 lines of C) and the model for NNTP is quite similar to ActivityPub (multiple servers, can post on your own, your posts are pushed to other servers, comments are threaded).
An AP to NNTP gateway would be cool (although I don’t think I have access to any textual NNTP servers any more) - could even add the reverse and use Usenet as a transport mechanism.
From what I know, IMAP is a complex spec with a million gotchas that everyone implements slightly differently. POP3/NNTP are things you can lash up without going insane.
Years ago, I hacked together a NNTP gateway to Drupal. It reads articles and comments from the Drupal database and publishes them over NNTP. Posting new comments through this protocol is also possible.
I’ve written a lobsters/reddit to NNTP proxy prototype (with posting support), but it quickly turned out that POP3/NNTP is not an ideal protocol for this, IMAP would be better; core reason is that NNTP doesn’t support syncing between multiple machines, and IMAP does support it.
So I’m a little bit sad that MOP3 is not MIMAP.
Although it’s true that one can create another layer with dovecot+fetchmail that would convert nntp/pop3 to imap. But this starts to be somewhat complicated.
Oh yes, I forgot: I wrote a Lobsters to NNTP adapter a while back. I would not call NNTP simple - between the statefulness, MIME, and keeping a mapping between article IDs (which must be linear and monotonic) and your actual representation, it can be quite tricky to do right.
Modern (past 15 years or so) GUI mail clients almost certainly speak IMAP.
But terminal clients are probably another story – many of them historically have been developed by people who roll their eyes and sigh and re-explain “this is an MUA” over and over when asked about features like accessing mail stored on a remote server. Admittedly this was years and years ago, but the last time I tried mutt, even it didn’t have IMAP support and seemed like it had only grudgingly supported POP3.
A lot of 90s mail clients before ~1998 didn’t speak IMAP - POP was much more popular then, and did map to how dialup users used email.
This is completely brilliant!
I would genuinely love AP over IMAP.
I want to get my friends’ post into folders with their names on them. It would be more like a messaging app than twitter-style firehose, but I could use the email client that’s accessible to me.
or even some kind of… Networked News Transfer Protocol
I wasn’t aware of any accessible clients for that. But that’s cool.
Might be something that could be implemented as a Dovecot storage plugin to save a lot of the IMAP implementation hassle (obviously with something else putting the AP stuff into the storage.)
I’ve been tinkering with something like this (no usable code yet) with the end goal of having an Emacs-based threaded discussion view comparable to what notmuch.el and Gnus provide so it would have to deal with fetching threads referenced by messages in the direct feeds.
The approaches I’ve been considering:
But in the meanwhile mastodon.el has been working quite well.
Another neat tool I’ve been using is bitlbee-mastodon which is a way to have an IRC based frontend to Mastodon.