[luakit-dev] Luamail, building a mail client into luakit

[dieter at plaetinck.be]

Hi,
Gerry (maintainer of a nice lua imap library - https://gitorious.org/luaimap/luaimap4) and I have started working on a mail module, built right into luakit.
My first idea was to build a standalone mail client by reusing the
luakit C-based host program and all bindings it exposes, with a set of different config files (and more libs/bindings),
but instead we choose to neatly integrate the mail client in luakit
itself, which makes it easier to develop, and probably more
convenient for the user; by forking the luakit project and trying to do our stuff in a non-invasive way to keep the browser part like it is.

The thought of writing a mail client that works for me is something I've been pondering for a long time, here are my main wishes/goals:
- support for rendering html mails and rich content (images, html, embedded videos) properly (webkit) (I receive newsletters and rich content from rss feeds by means of rss2email-xdg)
- play nice with WM's, support many keybindings and use UI widgets that don't suck too hard (i.e. no ncurses, be an X client, use gtk)
- provide a unified interface to email sending/receiving/searching
- keep my homedir clean (i.e. cache mail and search indices in $XDG_CACHE_DIR)
- luakit-style goodness (expose lua bindings, allow user to change anything).  I need lots of customisation options.  Claws-mail is currently the least sucky client I found, but the customisation possibilities I'm looking for are way beyond what claws can offer.

Currently we have a rough working prototype.  You can find our work at:
https://github.com/lama7/luakit (luamail branch) - Gerry's main lib/mail.lua which is the basic framework + imap support for mail browsing and viewing
https://github.com/Dieterbe/luakit/tree/luamail - changes on top of Gerry's work: crude mail composing, smtp sending, and some documentation
updates

As proof that the prototype actually works, I just sent this mail through luamail. yeah! B-)

Dieter