After the first release candidate of Mailody, some people actually installed it and it resulted in a list of broken things. Sending messages using TLS or SSL was the most prominent one.

Of course there are a lot of mailservers where Mailody was not able to talk to. Primarily because I used a lot of reversed engineering instead of reading the RFC’s thoroughly. The former is of course much more fun. But slowely I’m finding my way through the RFC’s and fixing things as people report them to me.

There are also things you don’t count on, like that I under estimated the amount of users that need authentication for SMTP. But I fixed that yesterday by supporting AUTH LOGIN. I’m trying to prevent looking at SASL, because the bugreports of KMail are still giving me headaches (when i was bughunter there), but sooner or later, it will be added.

There are also things you don’t count on, but are logical. Like a Microsoft Windows server giving inconsistent replies or some mailservers interpreting the RFC differently.

One of the big disadvantages of being the only hacker on an application is that quality control is missing. Nobody is looking over your shoulder to see if you have the priorities right, making stupid mistakes or to talk to about certain problems. Talked to Thiago for a couple of minutes yesterday and that gave a simple solution to a problem I had. Would be great to have that permanently.

Really motivating things are people finding the irc-channel (#mailody). Frode M. Døving and Achim Bohnet are always there and give a thorough beating on everything I do. That’s really great. There are also people reporting problems, telling me how to be more RFC complient and so on. That’s also nice.

Also here and there popup reviews of Mailody. For example this one, which I like because it points out the flaws (after some corrections).

There are also things that I can not control, but which I would like. I would like very much some graphics (no I refuse to borrow stuff from other MUA’s) and I would like some usability support, for example I have a patch ready which implements the sorting of threads based on the youngest child, but I’m not sure how to tell the user that that is the way it is sorted.

Later this week a next release candidate I hope.