##Jimmy-Mail v0.99.1

###Overview:

Jimmy-Mail is a console-based email client built on Python's Curses library. Its functionalities include email retrieval, reply, flag/unflag, and email searches. Also, this program features a simplistic robot that can understand human-ish commands such as 'list folders' (mailbox view is triggered) and 'all emails from Kevin about basketball' (email searching is triggered). More functionalities will be added in the future, including more customizable UI and better human-language understanding capability.

###Design Motivations:

Because mainstream email clients tend to consume substantial amount of system resources, the author has been seeking for simplistic email clients, such as console-based ones. After trying some such softwares (Mutt, Alpine, etc.) as instructed by Professor, the author found the control of those programs hard to learn (similar to Vim and Emacs), so a great focus of this program is a user-friendly interface, which initiates the idea of "Jimmy-Bot" human-language interpretation function.

###Code Structure:

This program's code structure is mainly as follows:

• main.py: entry-point of Jimmy-Mail project;
• mailbox.py: defines the extension of Python's IMAP and SMTP class, including: MainSession (encloses both of following classes), MailBoxIMAP (extension class for Python's IMAP class), MailBoxSMTP (extension class for Python's SMTP class).
• IOControl.py: the singe file that implements most of the program's I/O functionalities, including the user interface, key stroke responder, email data processing, Bot-command parsing, etc.
• appdata.py: the file includes all string constants as screen output. The file is separated from the remaining part of code to allow multi-lingual flexibility in user interface.
• misc.py: the file containing small functions for miscellaneous purposes, such as "size string" generation, "date string" parsing and email validation check.
• run.sh: the wrapper script executable in Linux that can call main.py with different parameters.
• html2text.py: an external module to convert a HTML string to plain text. The script is written by Aaron Swartz.

####Running Options:

./run.sh                        Default mode for Jimmy-Mail

./run.sh EMAIL_ADDRESS          Call Jimmy-Mail with designated email

./run.sh help                   Display running instructions

(Note 1: All "./run.sh" can be substitued with "python main.py" for non-Linux systems.)

(Note 2: More parameter options will be supported, such as IMAP/SMTP server auto-completion)

####Program Functions:

• Command Line Interface:
  • Compose Email: enter "n", "nm", "compose", etc. to command line.
  • Check Inbox: enter "i", "inbox", etc to command line.
  • View Folder List: enter "ls", "folders", "dir", etc. to command line.
  • Check out specific folder: enter only folder name to command line.
  • Search for emails: enter "s", "f", "search", etc. to command line.
  • View brief help: enter "?", "help", etc. to command line.
  • Smart-Command Interpretation: speak to Jimmy-bot in human-language!
• Email List Mode:
  • Up/Down/PgUp/PgDn/Mouse Scroll: move through the email list
  • f/F: flag/unflag any specific email
  • SPACE/ENTER: read the specific email
  • r/R: reply to the specific email
  • D: delete the specific email (move to Trash Folder)
  • q/Q: quit to Command Line Interface
• Email Viewing Mode:
  • All keys other than SPACE/ENTER option are active.
• Smart-Command Interpretation:
  • <email/msg> from : search all emails from a sender
  • <email/msg> about : search all emails with given keywords
  • Feel free to try some combinations! (Note: Jimmy-Bot will be smarter in the future)

####Technical Details:

• Python's imaplib and smtplib libraries are used for communicating with email servers. All flags and commands are strictly compatible with the IMAP standards outlined in RFC3501.
• Only SSL-enabled IMAP and SMTP sessions are allowed to enhance security.
• Python's email library is used to encode/decode email messages. All operations are in accordance with MIME standard (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).
• Non-ASCII (like UTF-8) headers (like in French, Chinese and Japanese) are supported for display.

####Known Issues:

• Because this email client retrieves all emails of a given list at once, it can be slow (>10s) for more than 300 messages per list. Effort will be made to retrieve message headers page by page.
• Although internalization is supported with best effort, some issues may still appear for Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters. Those issues will be fixed when possible.

####Acknowledgments:

• Thanks Professor David Kosbie for his wonderful introductory course of Python and his suggestions for my project;
• Thanks my Project Mentor Disha Bora who tracked the progress of this project, and my friends who gave me feedback on the user experience of Jimmy-Mail;
• At last, the thank goes to Aaron Swartz, whose html2text module is a great help for displaying HTML-only messages.