Hi All,
I'm the author of the Popcorn mail client, and I'm posting here by request from ndebord (Nick) who told me about this forum thread via e-mail.
It's always good to hear about people who use (or used) Popcorn. I still do some work on it now and then since it has always been and continue to be my primary mail client every day.
Since Popcorn is now open source, you are free to do with it as you wish, but before you start doing any development work, I think it's a good idea for me to tell you a bit about the state of things.
Popcorn is now well over 10 years old, and it was started as a project for me to learn Windows/Win32 C and later (to a limited extent) C++ development, and its overall architecture has never been very well thought out in any way. This has begun to manifest itself more and more as time has passed, and it is one of many reasons that I have stopped doing any regular/supported development work on it. The program concept is still suprisingly usable, but it really needs a ground-up rewrite, at least in my own humble opinion.
Some of the key features missing that I have never started working on because of the aging architecture is:
* Multiple sockets (being able to send and receive at the same time, checking multiple accounts at the same time etc.)
* UNICODE charset support
* Language encoding for sent messages
* More than one instance of the mail editor at the same time
* and much more...
That said, replacing or enhancing functionality in Popcorn is relatively simple because of its loosely coupled modules implementation method, ie. each logical bit is isolated as a single (more or less standalone) C++ object wherever possible.
A few things I would like to answer/clarify from earlier in this thread:
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Yes, those are two important aspects of email: html and attachments. I would also like to see the popcorn.ini set up as a portable app, so you don't need a complete path statement there.
Attachments: The latest release of Popcorn has built-in support for both sending (encoding) and receiving (decoding) attachments, it's not perfect by any standard, but it's reasonably functional.
HTML: Popcorn only supports showing HTML content as plain (tag-stripped) text, so there is much room for improvement here. I'm personally against showing HTML content in any mail-client, so this type of feature would never be implemented by me.
Portable: Popcorn fully supports being a portable app, with or without SSL support, even running from read-only media. All paths used in Popcorn are relative, so I'm not quite sure what you mean?
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it doesn't work with external command paramters which is making things painful to execute from context menu(send image url>link etc)
Popcorn has limited support for working with external commands (cmd line parameters) and it also supports the mailto: protocol, but there is much room for improvement.
If you have any more questions or you need any more information, please let me know.
Kind regards,
ultrafunk
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2009 02:15PM by ultrafunk.