git

I’ve been using darcs as my version control software of choice for quite a while now, but unfortunately I’m having trouble using it with dreamhost 🙁 I’ve looked about on the web for anybody who has successfully created public repositories on dreamhost, but all I can find is people asking how to do it. Since I want to make the source for my httpmail plugin available and working with the sourceforge subversion repository is a pain I’ve decided to give git a try.

My public git repository is available at http://git.danielparnell.com/ and the httpmail project can be accessed directly via
http://git.danielparnell.com/public/httpmail.git.

The code currently in the repository contains a target for Leopard which partially works. I’m not going to release binaries as yet because it is nowhere near ready for prime time at this stage.

What works:

  1. Connecting to Hotmail
  2. Downloading messages from the inbox
  3. Downloading messages from sub-folders (as long as the plugin is configured to store sub-folders under the root folder, not the inbox folder)

What doesn’t work

  1. Creating accounts
  2. Sending mail
  3. Pretty much everything else

So, if you’re feeling brave, and have git installed on your system along with XCode 3.0, feel free to check out the source and have a play (any code contributions will be greatly appreciated). For everybody else, rest assured I am working on it, if somewhat slowly.

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5 Comments

  1. Very cool. Looks like we can just download a snapshot of the code, that is nice. I’ve only been using CVS myself, and before that projector, but a snapshot works just fine.

    Is tiger.xcodeproj what we are supposed to be using?? I noticed a leopard folder, but no leopard.xcodeproj.

    I”m not exactly familiar with Objective C (unfortunately I”m one of those carbon library holdouts), but I can take a look.

  2. Yes, the tiger.xcodeproj is the one to use. I really need to clean up the codebase, and I have been doing some experiments over the last few months with the aim of making a more full featured plugin. Due to my limited time to work on things I’ve not got as far as I would like with those experiments 🙁

    As for Objective-C, it’s pretty easy really. The tricky thing about this project is the fact that there is no documentation available for the Mail internal APIs. I’ve been using an amazing tool called class-dump to build the headers for all the classes in both Mail.app and Message.framework, and recently I’ve also been playing with a really cool toll called otx (http://otx.osxninja.com/) which does a really nice disassembly of applications and frameworks 🙂 Both have been really useful in getting things working under Leopard.

  3. I’m new to Mac (about six weeks only) and was using your httpmail plug in (is that the right word for it? anyway) for tiger, I just tonight switched to Leopard, not knowing my mail would no longer work. Thanks for working on something so soon for the rest of us who don’t know much about computers…is this the site I should check back with to see your progress? Thanks again for your time and wonderful work to help the rest of us out!

  4. Daniel,

    You had over 200,000 people download httpmail from Version Tracker, if I’m reading it correctly. I would gladly pay a decent amount of money to have a Leopard compatible version, and so would most of those other 200K people once they switch to Leopard. I admire your generosity, but just give it some thought.

  5. Daniel,
    Thanks for working on this. Wish I could help, but it’s way over my head. I too lost hotmail functionality when I installed Leopard and am currently using Microsoft Entourage which integrates perfectly with hotmail (no surprise there), but is an otherwise atrocious mail program.

    Maybe this is naive of me, but would disassembling the source for Entourage help your project?

    Keep at it it’s a great plugin.

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