Tinymail
Contents
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.
Answer
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 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. As said above, it would also be possible to support a new such format (i.e. one that stores Jabber messages on disk).
Information about tinymail
Documentation about building
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/ vi $HOME/.tinymail/accounts/01
[tinymail] type=store proto=imap hostname=IMAPSERVER user=USERNAME name=OLPC test
Using the Python bindings
cd tests/python-demo/ export PYTHONPATH=/opt/tinymail-olpc/lib/python2.4/site-packages/tinymail-1.0 python tinymail-python-test.py
