Joining forces vs. starting from scratch (was Re: Proposal to start a new implementation...)

[Joshua Cranmer 🐧]

On 4/10/2017 9:47 PM, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> emailjs.org
>
>       o Implementations of MIME, IMAP, SMTP
>       o Definitely need to look at this, potentially use it.
>

I did a writeup of the email.js SMTP implementation in comparison to 
Thunderbird's current implementation two years ago (wow, has it really 
been that long). The general conclusion is that it bakes in a lot of 
assumptions that aren't really safe for general use (for example, email 
messages are only ASCII body contents, or ignoring SMTP features not 
found on gmail like delivery status notification). The response from the 
email.js people was more or less "feel free to go ahead and rewrite 
large portions of it to suit your needs", but there is a fair amount of 
rewriting that has to be done there to make it more amenable to some of 
the tasks to support.

One of the issues that comes up when doing these sorts of libraries is 
platform support. It turns out that the standard JS library is so sucky 
you need a lot of little things to do useful stuff, and there's a few 
components that end up getting needed to be shared between all of the 
libraries. Doing the dump-this-ASCII-in-an-ArrayBuffer or base64 
conversion ends up cropping up in a lot of places, yet the pieces are so 
easy that it's generally not worth the bother to create an entire 
library with an entire dependency for just one thing. Whatever we do, I 
strongly encourage some base utility libraries just to avoid the 
fifteen-fold duplication of this stuff that will crop up otherwise.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist

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