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

[Evan Laforge]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 3:05 PM, John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> wrote:
> 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.

This is off-subject, but I too wrote a mail program in python around
1999 or so.  I eventually gave up on imaplib and wrote my own which
was (if I may say so myself) simpler, easier to use, and less buggy.
If no one has replaced it >10 years later, I'm guessing not too many
people care about it.  I was pretty tired of email by that point and
tossed the whole project into some dark corner and forgot about it.

Nowadays if I want to send email, it's cmdline sendmail all the way.