Custom POP3/SMTP Mail Client
Think you can write a better web mail interface? I know I do :-D. I’ll have to take a look at it a bit more when I get a chance.
If you’re interested, here are a few good starting points for ya:
- A small introduction for a C# client implementation. Looks like a good starting point to get your code going.
- RFC1939 and subsequent extension, RFC2449. The official specification for the POP3 protocol; a good reference to clear up any ambiguities when writing your implementation.
- RFC2821. The official specification for SMTP (used for sending email messages). I dealt quite heavily with this RFC when I was at Factiva. Quite an interesting spec, but probably better to use CDOSYS instead if you have that available and you don’t need full control over the SMTP implementation.
- An article by Duncan Mackenzie on writing a custom client. Duncan also has a neat little ballon popup implemented.
- A .Net 2.0 library for POP3 communication. Looks full featured and documented…good starting point if you’re not interested in the intricacies of POP3.
- A good sample POP3 session “conversation” example. It helps to understand how the messages are typically used in a session.
Will be interesting, I’m looking forward to getting some free time to work on this.
I’m debating whether it makes sense, from a performance perspective, to use a sort of POP3-SQL Server synchronizer to move messages from one or multiple accounts into one repository for fast indexing and lookup.
