alt Hacker NewsI wrote my own email archiving software. The hardest part was dealing with all the weird edge cases in my 20+ year collection of .eml files. For being so simple conceptually, email is surprisingly complicated.
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stevekemp • yesterday at 2:44 PM
I wrote a console-based mail client, which was 25% C++ and 75% Lua for defining the UI and the processing.
It never got too popular, but I had users for a few years and I can honestly say MIME was the bane of my life for most of those years.
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Email is one of those cursed standards where the committee wasn't building a protocol from scratch, but rather trying to build a universal standard by gluing together all of the independently developed existing systems in some way that might allow them to interoperate. Verifying that a string a user has typed is a valid email address is close to impossible short of just throwing up your hands and allowing anything with a @ somewhere in it.