[Self-interest] email client in Smalltalk or Self (was: UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - Wednesday 24 November)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Russell Allen wrote on Wed, 17 Nov 2021 16:12:06 +1100
> > On 17 Nov 2021, at 8:44 am, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> > 
> >  I use Celeste in Squeak Smalltalk for
> > my email but it does have a few limitations. Fancy quotation marks also
> > get rendered as question marks, for example.
> 
> Wow that?s a name I had forgotten. I used Celeste back in the late 90s
> (when there were fewer emojis!)

The problem with emojis in Celeste is not in its code but that the font
it is using lacks many characters. On the other hand, the whole font
system supposes characters are strictly black and white so even a font
with the emojis would probably not look very good.

By the way, Hernan, feel free to use whatever characters you like in
your messages here. Now that I know what the emojis do in Celeste I
won't mistake them for a question again. I really should patch the
program to show the hex code for missing characters instead so I can
tell what people tried to write a little better.
 
> I quite liked it, but it wasn?t really maintained or updated by anyone.

Some people kept patching it, but it was very obvious that they were not
using it themselves. I only did some quick and dirty fixes to be able to
actually receive messages - the original code was written supposing all
messages actually followed the relevant standards and were never badly
formed.

> Do you use it in a new Squeak or an old image? Has anyone updated
> it at all or is it still POP+SMTP?

I use a Squeak 4.1 image for Celeste which has the problem of not
allowing files larger than 2GB and Celeste stores all emails in a single
external file so every few years I reach this limit. I tried moving to a
64 bit Squeak 5.3 but it would mess everything up when reading my change
set files to patch Celeste, even though they look just fine in a text
editor.

Here is an IMAP client for Squeak (5.2 or later) that I have not tried
myself, yet:

https://github.com/hpi-swa-teaching/IMAPClient

> Update: the Squeak wiki still has my old screenshots from 20 years ago!

It is very rare for someone to update anything on the wiki, which used
to greatly upset Andreas Raab. On the other hand, old information also
has value. There are sometimes reasons to use older versions of things.
Some projects still are based on Dan Ingalls' old "mini 2.2" image for
example.

One reason why I don't put any effort into Celeste even though I use it
is that it would probably be easier to make a nicer email client in Self
from scratch instead. Before Celeste the client I used the longest was
KMail though I also use Outlook Express on another machine for a
different account. So far the filtering stuff in Celeste is the nicest I
have used.

-- Jecel