Make email a better citizen of the modern HTTP world…

We’re currently adding some mail-in functionality to some web applications. You know like emailing stuff to an application which then does fancy things with it.
And honestly the code for this really sucks. It works… but I’m not very happy with our solution:

The mailserver is running on an extra machine so we connect via IMAP fetch the emails and parse the raw data. If everything is OK, the email is moved to a special backup folder.
There are some other solutions like Astrotrain which pipes the email to a script but these aren’t better…

So one question hits my head over and over again:
Why is this so hard? What did you mailserver developers do in the last fiveish years???!!! Did anything in the email world change?

Here is my wishlist for you:

In short: Build an easy to use simple restful API for email which stupid web developers like I am can use to build awesome stuff upon.
This would make email a much better citizen in the modern HTTP web world.

May 12, 2009 | by Bumi | Filed Under Railslove

 

Comments

2 Responses to “Make email a better citizen of the modern HTTP world…”

  1. Basti on May 12th, 2009 12:46 pm

    There’s a nice article (and a link to a prototype of an IMAP to HTTP gateway) over at the Webhooks blog:

    http://blog.webhooks.org/2009/02/13/restful-email-over-http/

    There’s even an IETF spec draft for “HTTP Access to Email Stores”:

    http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dusseault-httpmail-00

    Anyway, I second every single point on that list! :)

  2. Bumi on May 13th, 2009 9:43 am

    Thanks Basti,
    these are really good links and point in a good direction.
    The draft is a good starting point. But as far as I know there is no one working on improving the draft?

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