Lamson - email app coding without the palm sweat | Hacker News Reader

Lamson - email app coding without the palm sweat

theregister.co.uk

30 pointstwampss11 comments

I spent about 35 hours developing the first version of the mail handler we use on <www.classlet.com>. I took the knowledge I gained from that, turned around, and re-wrote it from scratch in about 15 hours.

Weighing in at under 500 lines of code, it makes heavy use of Python's mimetype and smtp libraries as well as some abstractions from Django's mail library. It operates on mail piped into stdin by procmail every 10 seconds as retrieved by fetchmail. The subsystem has basic logging and in the event of errors procmail dumps the entire message into an mbox file and notifies me. Retrying is as simple as `cat mbox | classlet/procmail.py`

That said: I applaud any attempt to make this easier, more robust, and more standard. Our mail processor is actually quite simple, but has a long way to go in terms of maturity.

I'd love to hear about other experiences with this stuff. I know the Posterius guys lurk around here, how about some insight? :-)

I've also extracted Django's mail abstractions (since django.core.mail is dependant on django.settings) for a unreleased project I'm working on. We (I?) should probably make this a stand alone package (with the relevant tests from Django's test suite).

That sounds like you're volunteering. Have at it; I won't steal your thunder :-)

Interesting that this has gotten something this kind of attention already, the project has only just started. I suppose that it owes a lot to Zed being Internet-famous, but still.

Direct link to the project page:

http://lamsonproject.org/

I don't get it - why is this cool? Isn't "mail" one of those outdated meatspace idioms we can finally allow to die?

i know email isn't the cool thing to do anymore as far as connecting online, but in business, i think it's still king.

i'd have serious doubts about someone wanting to correspond about business matters via twitter, facebook, etc.

so i'd say that, no, mail is not something outdated and should die - just another form of communication that has it's place.

Yep. Suits, spammers, scammers and diehard hackers (using mutt in a tiling window manager no doubt). Everyone else is jumping ship. I'm not saying Facebook/Twitter or even Wave is the future... but something else than email is, and we'll probably see it within a year or two.

I've only seen the term, "meatspace", in the last few weeks. Is this some new nerd trend? Attempting to ostracise yourself from the general public by referring to them with degrading inhuman terms such as this is a rather stupid idea, IMHO.

I've only seen the term, "meatspace", in the last few weeks. Is this some new nerd trend?

It's at least 15 years old and faded out with the rest of the "cyberpunk" genre.

It's not really an attempt to ostracize oneself from the general public by referring to them with degrading inhuman terms.

It's just a handy word to refer to stuff that's not online.

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