Cleancode.org >> Projects >> email

November 1st 2009 : Groovy? - posted by Dean
So, I was considering ruby fir the porting language, but after a recommendation, I'm now thinking of going with Groovy. This all depends, however. I want good IDE support for it and while I was granted an open source license for a great ruby/rails IDE called RubyMine, their groovy support is in their larger IDE and I'm not sure if I qualify for it. However, I'm applying and we will see. As for using Eclipse, well, have you looked at the support fir groovy? Terrible. So, I am submitting the application and we will see... Groovy it may be...

October 28th 2009 : Porting and name changing... - posted by Dean
So, over the years I have really started to part ways with the C programming language. I use it at work mostly but I have been using other more modern languages such as Java, Ruby, etc... Everytime I go back to writing C, I think to myself "This would be so much nicer in language, well... any other language than C"

For a program such as eMail, things would not only work better (in my opinion), but it would be easier for me to develop in a more modern language. I'm continuously getting feature requests and bug reports from everyone and I feel that I would be better suited to tackle these features in a modern language.

Also, let's face it, this is an open source project and quite honestly has always been out there not just to benefit the end user, but to expand my knowledge in my down time. This project has been going on since 2001 and I have learned a lot of neat things along the way, but these days, there are newer and brighter things to be learning.

While I don't have any issues with C Programming for certain purposes, I just feel it's time for me to learn more modern languages and with my recent trails with Ruby, I have become very excited by it. It is an outstanding language and I would like to begin porting to this language in my spare time.

A lot of people may suspect that this is a bad move. I obviously don't see it that way. Sure, Ruby is interpreted, it's slower, etc, etc... But the benefits is that I spend less time code, more time adding features and testing and the time I do spend coding, I actually enjoy it because I'm avoiding all of the boilerplate coding that I have grown to dislike in C (and even Java). I also believe that the resources used by the ruby interpreter aren't going to cause any issues... or at least it hasn't on my small server box (only 512M of memory and a 1.2Ghz processor) for all of the ruby apps (including many rails apps) I have running on it.

With that being said, I have decided to port eMail to Ruby. If you would like to discourage me in doing so, please let me know what you think and why it would effect you. I will be leaving the C code in its current state in the repo as well as having a release available. I plan on continuing bug fixes on the C version for a while (probably not always, of course) but new features will be implemented in the Ruby version. I will also move the C version over to a Git repo at some point.

On another note, I am going to change the name of the project as well. I've had many complaints about the name over the years but I'm a stubborn man and can't seem to figure out a good name for it. I'm still not sure what I'm going to rename it to... but when the Ruby port happens, it will happen under a new name. Stay tuned.

September 29th 2009 : Enabling TLS - posted by Dean
I am getting a lot of e-mail regarding TLS and it "not working". Particularly due to the error message: "No SSL support compiled in. Disabling TLS."

The reason you are seeing that error message is because SSL SUPPORT IS NOT COMPILED INTO THE BINARY. eMail looks for and uses the dynamic OpenSSL libraries (you can use GnuTLS as well). In other words, the .so libs and not the .a libs. If you look at the output from your ./configure, you will see that it couldn't find OpenSSL.

Yes, other binaries that use OpenSSL may indeed work because they're using the .a (static) libraries instead of the dynamic ones. However, at this time, I am looking for and trying to use the dynamic libraries.

How can you fix this? Well, if you're using a package management system like yum, apt-get or whatever, look for openssl-devel or libssl-dev packages. For instance, on Ubuntu, you should install libssl-dev: apt-get install libssl-dev

Now, once you have installed these libraries, you MUST DO A CLEAN COMPILE. In other words, go back to the eMail source directory and run make clean; make

The entire process on Ubuntu would look like this:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
cd ~/email-3.1.2
./configure
make clean
make
make install

January 4th 2009 : 3.1.2 Released - posted by dean
A quick update release to fix an issue with using an external editor in Cygwin and also adding an option (--no-encoding) to let people avoid UTF-8 encoding of non ASCII characters.

January 3rd 2009 : 3.1.1 Released - posted by dean
This release just addresses some compilation issues that people were having. If you experience anymore compilation issues, please let me know as I only have Debian and Mac OS X to test on.