🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <465995568wnr@infinet.demon.co.uk>
   Alan Middleton <alan@infinet.demon.co.uk> writes:
> 
> I'm new to IP stuff but have a VB project involving the need to 
> handle & generate email on a client's hard disk, regardless 
> of which Service Provider (or email software) the client uses 
> anywhere in the world.

This is going to be largely impossible, unless you're prepared to cope 
with hundreds of proprietary formats. For example, Turnpike compresses 
and encrypts the mail - you're likely to find it impossible to work 
alongside that.

However, in priciple you don't need (by the sounds of it) to be overly 
concerned with POP/SMTP/etc since you'll be relying on the clients 
software for that. 

You know what incoming mail looks like - it's going to look like that is 
its raw form on most systems (it may be compressed by Turnpike, or 
whatever, but when uncompressed it's going to look the same). How it's 
stored may differ, but there are only really two obvious formats - each 
message as a file of its own, or all the messages concatenated into a 
"mailbox" (the latter being most likely). There may be index files 
alongside, but you shouldn't need to worry about them. 

Outgoing mail, AIUI, isn't handled by POP, so you only need worry about 
SMTP. In all systems the information is going to be largely the same - a 
mail message to be sent, and the envelope info as stored in the .WRK file 
with KA9Q. Not all software will use .WRK files, of-course, in fact 
they're probably fairly uncommon. But the information contained must be 
held somewhere as it forms the basis of the conversation with the SMTP 
server on the machine(s) you connect to.

In other words: make it work with KA9Q, and it should be fairly easy to 
expand it to work wit other systems as you go. There are a number of 
offline readers available - look at SimTel for starters - and you could 
download a few of those to work from as well.

Mark.
-- 
int MeaningOfLife (void) { return 42; }   // mcr@holly.demon.co.uk
function MeaningOfLife :integer; begin MeaningOfLife := 6 * 9 end;