💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › clseibold › 5660 captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:54:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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@billsmugs I still think you're overestimating the effort it took me to make a gembox parser. It took like 2 minutes to make, lol. I mostly just wrap around my already-make gemmail parser, detect `<=====` to split stuff, and then pass each split piece to the gemmail parser. You could probably even do what I did in even less time and with even less effort by using strings.Split in golang.
Although, you do have a point in splitting up a file each time the inbox is opened. If the gembox file ends up having like thousands of gemmails in it, then I could see how this might make it slow, but modern computers are pretty darn fast, so I'd have to test to see how slow it actually would be for big files like this.
2023-09-27 · 1 day ago
re binary data, the spec is pretty clear that's a non starter and you should just send a link to a file.
One could always work around that restriction using base32 or base64 encoding, however.
22 hours ago
@clseibold Having read my own messages back, I'm worried I've come across as antagonistic and/or dismissive about the gembox format, which wasn't my intention! The ease of transferring/backing up entire mailboxes and setting file permissions are definitely advantages of your system over mine that hadn't occurred to me (UNIX permissions are something I keep meaning to do more reading about in general as I know they are quite powerful but have very little knowledge of how they work and what they can do) and you're probably right that the performance impact is negligible in reality.
With regards to forwarding and sender line ordering, if Alice sends a message to Bob's server, which auto-forwards it on to me, I would expect to see the message in my inbox start with the following, with my server adding the first two lines and Bob's server adding the last two:
< b@b.com Bob @ 2023-09-27T00:00:01 < a@a.com Alice @ 2023-09-27T00:00:00
The example in the spec for sender lines omits timestamps but looks like it matches this order:
< development@mailing-lists.com Development mailing list < source@example.com Source user
I understood this as Source user sending a message to the mailing list and I then receive a message from the mailing list address.
21 hours ago
@billsmugs I didn't read it as antagonistic, so don't worry about that :)
Also, you're absolutely correct and I misread the spec. I will have to change my server code to prepend rather than append. This is a simple change.
The thing I still have a question about is if timestamps are grouped together in reverse order like the senders are, or if the sender lines and timestamp lines are intermingled, like so:
@ Final Destination Timestamp
< Mailinglist
@ Mailinglist Timestamp
< Source user
Of if it's supposed to be more like the following:
< Mailinglist
< Source user
@ FInal Destination Timestamp
@ Mailinglist Timestamp
If it's the first one, then I will have to make major changes to my parser, because currently my parser does the second option.
Personally, I don't like that the senders are in reverse order. I feel the source user should always be at the top, not as the last sender line. For mailinglists, you want the source user as the real sender, but for forwarding emails, you want the last sender (the forwarder) as the real sender, I suppose. Hm....
In the python implementation i wrote a gembox folder class that uses the MH mailbox format. Honestly it's much nicer because you don't have to deal with indexes and stuff.
6 hours ago
Misfin Server Ideas — I believe I have written a basic solo-mailbox server in golang. It is running now, so people should be able to test it at my same misfin address (clseibold@auragem.letz.dev). I wanted to outline some ideas that I have for the server: 1. I want it to support both solo-mailbox and multi-mailbox setups. 2. An interesting idea came up when I compared the spec to gemini. Gemini has this proxy ability, I believe, so that it could actually proxy other gemini servers. This led...
💬 clseibold · 18 comments · 1 like · 2023-09-27 · 2 days ago