Resurrecting NeXTmail and/or new mail clients on NeXT

[Rhetorica]

Mail was always a cornerstone of NeXT's marketing pitches, but NeXTmail definitely does not work anymore. From skimming NeXTanswers, I get the impression that this may be partially ameliorated with a new build of sendmail, but there are clearly other issues that would need to be addressed.

Has anyone had any luck (or even just daydreams) about working on this? Bonus points if you've considered porting the improved MailViewer app from Rhapsody or 4.0PR1 to OS4.2.

[jade_nekotenshi]

I wonder if it'd be possible to port GNUMail.app back to OPENSTEP? I think it's modern enough to play nice with modern SMTP and IMAPS.

The requirement for TLS kinda shuts out black hardware, mostly, but it might be doable. I have a few other projects in the pipeline, but maybe Claude could figure it out. I'm not actually sure.

[ZombiePhysicist]

I do wonder if ai couldn't solve for making a good enough TLS engine that would work on at least the 040. Harder for a modern high bandwidth web stream, but for email seems in the realm of plausible.

[jade_nekotenshi]

Well, I've used Claude to build an engine for SSH and TLS, but the throughput using the chacha20-poly1305 cipher (the fastest modern cipher without hardware assistance) is only about 256kbps IIRC. That's probably fast enough for it to work, but it'll be slow if you have attachments or a lot of mail. Another option for that might be a proxy that lives elsewhere on the LAN, converting IMAPS into IMAP.

I might be able to optimize it further. Right now it's got some bugs that make it not work correctly on 68040 but those are probably surmountable.

[jade_nekotenshi]

Well, GNUMail is still actively maintained. As I said, I have some other projects in the queue that are vying for a limited supply of clanker gas, but consider a port of GNUMail back to OPENSTEP something that I plan to at least investigate.