ShrimpWorks

Okay well I’ve been working on this for a while now - a new version of my aging “E-Check” application.

Brief into to E-Check: It’s a small utility that allows you to preview your POP3 mail accounts before downloading their contents into your email client. If there’s a message you don’t particularly like the look of, you can select it and have it deleted before it ever reaches your Inbox.

E-Check was written in Delphi 3 using the Indy (at that time it was knows as Winshoes) suite of networking components. There are currently a number of problems on Windows XP, and of corse, it doesn’t run on anything but Windows.

I’m re-writing it as modular as possible in Python. Currently I have a very nice “MailBox” class that connects and collects headers of all mail messages on the server. Extracting information from each of these messages is extremely basic, just call MailBox.GetSubject(msg_id) for example returns the subject of the message requested. Yes, I know Python has a whole suite of email utilities (and I am in fact making use of a couple of the functions/objects it provides - thanks mithrandi), but this seems (to me anyway) a much more simplified way of managing and accessing email messages, plus you get the whole ‘mailbox’ effect…

Anyway, with that class doing it’s own thing, I can pretty much plug it into any GUI. Web-based mailbox previews? How about checking your mail via a WAP device? “Python for Delphi” would allow me to re-make it almost the same as it is now (bound to Windows still though). At the moment, I’m running with wxPython though. Had a bit of trouble getting to grips with sizers and stuff, but now I’m building most of the GUI by hand (tried loads of builders and things) and it’s working out pretty well indeed. Cross-platform too.

To-to for right now: Multiple account support and saving/loading config info to/from file.