For the past few days I’ve been working on getting the IMAP client in ErlMail to work with a YAWS based web-mail application that I am working on. To that end there is some good news and some bad news 
The good news is that it is working pretty well. It’s fast and the data is getting back to the web-mail client exactly how it is suppose to, or rather exactly how I told it to, which is part of the bad new.
I always find it amazing how different test data is from real life data 
Which is where the somewhat bad news comes in. Bugs, lots of bugs. Things I never would have thought of while working with it originally.
It doesn’t seems to like spaces in file names. I understand that one, but haven’t figured out how I want to fix it yet.
I made an assumption that one email address was coming through at a time, and now when an email message goes to more then one person it break, which will just require another layer of parsing on the envelope.
And my personal favorite of my current test data set, it doesn’t like extra parenthesis in the subject line. The parenthesis are used as a delimiter items in the envelope and it breaks when it seem more then it should. I have an idea of how to fix this, but nothing solid yet.
So the really great news is that I can display email messages from different mailboxes. I can get the subject, from, date, size and other general information. and I can display the detail of a message, save the actual body of the message so far.
After working out these bugs and being able to display the full message with potential attachment, I’ll need to start working on the SMTP client so that I can send email as well as view what I have received.