Writing a Linux Mail Client (URGENT)

hello everybody,

i need to write a mail client for Linux ( it should be IMAP Not pop) as i dont want to delete the mails from the server after reading them.

I need to read mails, send mails and get an alert when new mail arrives.
I dont know how to start, what APIs to use , i have good experience of C and familiar with Linux.

PLEASE HELP ME - Its Urgent

Ritesh
[email protected]

You're not going to be using C# to do it.

you din't specify your target language etc?

Paresh

I hope you have good idea about RFC (Request For Comment) these are internet standard documents created by community handling internet communication.

Your client will connect to server and it will follow a specific pattern of request response cycles, and to know them more in detail for IMAP , go here and read this document http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2060.txt , however implementing this RFC 2060 is not so easy.

If you are new to protocol and internet thing then it will take time, but you will get many readymade source code for c in linux for imap. But still you will need to understand protocol to maintain and support the application.

If you are doing it in java, then JMail API is already well defined and implelmented, you can try that out as well.

But writing IMAP mail client by your own will be really challenging.

hi akash,
thanks a lot for ur help. i was also thinking that IMAP is to be needed, let me make it clear what i need, my company has its own mail server, i need a client to check mail from that server, even a pop mail client will work but that will remove the messages from the server( so thought of IMAP), after reading the messages the application will forward them to their respective folders as specified by us. I need to do it on linux itself, i have limited time so sont have time to learn java, i have a good knowledge of C,C++,VC++ on win but not on Linux.

Can u please give me some idea where can i find some examples for this , or is there any book for it.

Ritesh

C# and linux ? since when is that possible....
for this kinda job you will need Tcp/IP sockets in C++. C# is only for windows... and it will only run using the CLI on Mac OS X and freeBSD.