Tinymail

The big question is

OLPC can't depend on server infrastructure

According to the website it supports IMAP, Exchange and NNTP. It can be used to send messages over SMTP.

Given that the OLPC is used in an environment where there are no servers running IMAP, NNTP or SMTP, what use is it?

If it included a built-in IMAP and SMTP server that would hold messages for relay when a suitable server comes in range, then it might be more useful. Read the Instant messaging challenges page to see what the issues and use-cases are.

Tinymail supports local formats too

The tinymail framework also supports local message stores like mbox, mh, spool and Maildir. Maildir is what Courier's imapd typically also uses. Tinymail also has its own local format.

The software that fetches or receives the messages can store them in such a mbox, spool, mh or Maildir on the device. Tinymail can access that (without needing a build-in IMAP service or extra process). You could also run a small IMAP service locally, but I fail to see the reason for that: tinymail can also use these local message stores, Maildir, mh, spool and mbox efficiently by itself.

The tool that receives these messages can be anything. As long as it writes the messages in the mbox, spool, mh or Maildir storage format (these are specified and standards). Whether that tool is going to be a small SMTP server or a plugin for the instant messaging infrastructure, doesn't matter.

A fetchmail-like tool

A small software that pulls messages from a nearby (suitable) server, i.e. one that is in range, and stores it on the local disk (for example using the Maildir or mbox format), sounds like a trivial task. You can, for example, reuse the existing fetchmail tool. If the Maildir, mh, spool nor mbox formats are suitable, it would be easy to create support for yet-another-such local-storage-format in tinymail.

Another possibility would be letting the instant messaging infrastructure pass the messages. Using some xsl you can transform typical Jabber messages to mbox or a Maildir. It would also be possible to support a new such format (i.e. one that stores Jabber messages on disk).

Information about tinymail

• Website
• API reference documentation
• Trac developers website
• Subversion source code repository

Documentation about building

• Building documentation

Building a tinymail suitable for OLPC

svn co https://svn.tinymail.org/svn/tinymail
cd tinymail/trunk
./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/tinymail-olpc --with-platform=olpc --enable-python-bindings
make && make install

note: You can also use jhbuild. It's in the build files of sugar

Creating an account

This is for the TnyAccountStore implementation of the libtinymail-olpc platform implementation (Jul 31 2006). You can find it here

mkdir -p $HOME/.tinymail/accounts/

IMAP

vi $HOME/.tinymail/accounts/01

[tinymail]
type=store
proto=imap
hostname=IMAPSERVER
user=USERNAME
name=OLPC IMAP test

Maildir

vi $HOME/.tinymail/accounts/02

[tinymail]
type=store
proto=maildir
url_string=maildir:///home/user/.mail/Maildir
name=OLPC Maildir test

Using the Python bindings

This example will use this Python demo application.

cd tests/python-demo/
export PYTHONPATH=/opt/tinymail-olpc/lib/python2.4/site-packages/tinymail-1.0
python tinymail-python-test.py