[Haskell-cafe] If Python now has a good email library; how challenging is it to call Python from Haskell?

[John Goerzen]

On 10/27/2010 01:22 PM, Donn Cave wrote:
> Don't know, but probably challenging enough to make it worth challenging
> the assumption that Python now has a good email library.
>
>> From a cursory look at the 3.0 library documentation, it looks to
> me like IMAP support still means the old imaplib module.  That's
> pretty rudimentary, compared to the HaskellNet IMAP support.

Not just rudimentary, but hideously buggy and with a terrible API. 
imaplib2 improves the API a bit but makes the bugginess worse.

I wrote and maintained OfflineIMAP from 2001 (I think) to 2010 so have 
just a wee bit of experience with that issue.

Python's mail system is not strong in my book.  It barely scrapes by. 
The MIME bits are decent, but the mail client stuff is very poor.  There 
is no abstraction system over generic mailbox repositories IIRC.  If you 
want to support IMAP, POP, Maildirs, mboxes, etc. you have to code up 
support for each.

-- John