therning.org/ magnus

Why can’t I change the ordering of mail in GMail?

I’ve never quite understood why anyone would want to have their most recently received mail at the top. Personally I always want to read mail in the order they arrive.

I’d love to see the Gmail S/MIME plugin for Firefox gain support for PGP/MIME. I can’t imagine it’d be too hard to add for someone who’s familiar with JavaScript and Firefox plugins. Or maybe there’s some other plugin out there that offers PGP/MIME support in Gmail?

Oh, and no, FireGPG isn’t good enough, it doesn’t do PGP/MIME, it doesn’t automatically verify/decrypt received emails, and it requires too much mouse interaction!

Yes, I think there’s an opening for an email client, it doesn’t have to be written in Haskell of course, but if I ever get my arse into gear it will be. Especially now that mutt-ng seems to have stalled in development, and even though mutt still is being developed I’ve gotten too spoilt by using mutt-ng exclusively for the last year or so. I’ve looked extensively at sup and it’s sweet, but due to some recent changes in what kind of machines I have access to on the web it doesn’t quite fit me anymore.

What would my ideal email client look like?

• GMail as backend, accessed through Python’s libgmail. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to write a Haskell module to deliver this part, but using Python to begin with is absolutely acceptable.
• Haskell for the frontend, specifically using vty for the UI.
• Vim, Yi, or any other old terminal-based editor to write email.

I’m confident vty has enough functionality. I’ve played with libgmail enough to be confident it offers enough access to mail data to do most everything I want from a client (the missing part is sending PGP/MIME messages, but sending mail through Google’s SMTP server is a workable solution). I’ve just started looking at options for mail parsing in Haskell, identifying three and already discarding one…

Yes, it’s all vapourware at this point, but hey, I can dream, right?

For a project that I’m considering I’ve spent a few hours looking into using Python to access GMail. There’s a nice Python library called libgmail, but it’s a bit overkill since all I want is to see how many unread emails I have. After a bit of searching I found ot that there’s an atom feed that can be used to do exactly that, https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom. It uses basic authentication, your GMail username and password. So, I started looking at Python and HTTP.

urllib2 seemed to fit the bill. It has a class called HTTPBasicAuthHandler to do the authentication and everything. I used the following code (entered in ipython of course):

import urllib2
req = urllib2.Request('https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom')
try:
    h = urllib2.urlopen(req)
except IOError, e:
    pass
e.headers['www-authenticate']

It should produce something like 'BASIC realm="New mail feed"'. Now we can do the proper connection, pull down the atom entry. I opted to use elementtree since it’s so easy to use. Here’s the full code I put together for this little experiment:

import urllib2
from elementtree.ElementTree import fromstring

ah = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
ah.add_password('New mail feed', 'https://mail.google.com', \
    'user@gmail.com', 'password')
op = urllib2.build_opener(ah)
urllib2.install_opener(op)
res = urllib2.urlopen('https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom')

lines = ''.join(res.readlines())
e = fromstring(lines)
fc = e.find('{http://purl.org/atom/ns#}fullcount')
print 'You have %i unread mail(s) in your GMail account' % int(fc.text)