Just when I’m having a lot of fun writing a mailclient, Qualcomm has decided to Open Source Eudora (I am sure those two facts are related ;-)). It will be maintained by the Mozilla foundation and there might be a linux release sometime.

I’ve used Eudora a lot in the past and even paid some money for it. Seems like there will be a future with a lot op options!

Today has been the first day I managed to use QMA – my new mail client – for the whole day. Some highly annoying bugs I fixed straight away, some larger bugs need some time to fix.

Last blog I was making my mind up which library to use for disecting incoming emails into parts. I then decided to go for libvmime. While implementing it, it wasn’t as flexible as I wanted it to be. Using output streams and exceptions and confusing documentation made me change my mind and switch to libkmime. After reading the source code I started to understand the way libkmime was set up and implemented it in QMA. It works great. And it is ‘real’ KDE stuff so it feels better as well.

I still use some custom methods where speed is crucial. Filling up the list of mails was too slow. It took ~15 seconds to fill up the box with ~8000 mails (parsing subject, sender and a date, based on a database field only containing those items), simply unacceptable. After reverting it to my previous parsing routines, it is displayed in ~3 seconds. I’ll have to investigate why libkmime is not so efficient there. Maybe add some statics to allow other clients to use them.

There are still some things to deal with, some minor like making it possible to send attachments, some more difficult like keeping the user interface responsive, mouse cursor updates, adding addresses to addressbook and editing them.

Enough to do, but if you want to have go at it, you can now get to the code, I uploaded it to trunk/playground/pim/qma yesterday.

Ok, I started writing my own parser for emailmessages when I started to create my mailapplication. Although it displays all the messages fine currently (html and text), it is to slow for big messages and to badly written to be maintainable in the long run.

But as there are a dozen mailclients, I decided that I’m not going to reinvent the wheel twice ;-). I looked at libkmime, but i’m not even sure that does what I want. The documentation is not understandable. This prevents me using it for now. Dejavu btw, I also failed to understand the documentation of kleopatra/certmanager and co.

Now I’m looking at libvmime, it’s documented, contains examples and even has a book, it’s complaining about -fexceptions for now, but that’s me going to fast again. I should start at page 1 of the book. If you know any reason to now use this lib, let me know.

I decided to rename my mail application, QMA is far from sexy and creating a logo is not that easy (unless you go for an envelope or a stamp). Ideas are welcome. I’ld like something like Pegasus, easy to remember, easy to get a subject for a logo.