Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: MUA written in Haskell, and MTA in Haskell help?

shae:

Nils Anders Danielsson writes:

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I had the same thought yesterday, after an Emacs-Lisp session in which I was trying to get Gnus to do exactly what I wanted it to...

Yeah, same here. I use Gnus and it's nice, but occasionally I want to erase it from the timestream.

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Out of curiosity, how much work would it take to write an easily configurable, decent MUA in Haskell? I don't know too much about MUAs, but I have a feeling that we already have quite a few libraries that are needed for the job: UIs (including HTML rendering...), plugins, various protocols, encryption...

It wouldn't be too hard. I'd suggest you start with Tuomo Valkonen's Riot[1] and go for something like mutt. I'm sure you could steal lots of useful code from Peter Simons' Postmaster[2].

Interestingly -- some may not know this -- I originally wrote hs-plugins to provide Haskell configuration and extension to a planned mutt-like MUA in Haskell :) If I was actually going to write one now, I'd start with hmp3 for the fast, portable curses ui and keystroke handling, and steal the mbox parsing code from riot. You'd have something working in a day or two, I'd reckon -- all the code is out there, it just needs to be assembled. -- Don