Randy,

>Does anyone have an idea about how hard it would be to build an email
>client in Squeak?

	I played with writing email clients in various dialects of Smalltalk using
SMTP protocol for sending and POP3 for receiving.  The biggest hurdles I've
encountered are: 1)  Attachments - properly encoding and decoding
attachments 2) What do do with the mail (how do I store/organize) incoming
and outgoing mail.  Other than that, it's pretty straight forward.


>I've been sampling many email clients and really can't find one that makes
>me happy--many of them have some nice features but all of them are less
>than I'd like. And that leads me to thinking "Wouldn't it be great if I
>could make my own in Squeak and finally have it the way I want it" but
>unfortunately I don't know enough about a) the complexity of talking to
>IMAP or POP serversand b) what's already implemented somewhere that could
>make it easier. The stuff I want to do is all up above that in the user
>interface and the tools.

If you'd like to collaborate, I could code the SMTP/POP3 interface for
sending and receiving email and you could code the UI portion.

If you'd rather do it yourself, the RFC that describe the POP3 and SMTP
protocols can be found at
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/information/rfc.html.  I've also
found a lot of free Java code around on the net the serves as a decent
example for how to use the protocol.

>
>Thanks,
>Randy

Take care,

Jay O'Connor
joconnor at roadrunner.com

"God Himself plays the bass strings first, when He tunes the soul"