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Hello. This set of programs is MailTask. This is a brief document intending to familiarize users with how to use this program.

MailTask is a suite of three related programs. They are server.py, client.py, and mt_scrtry_rn.py. These will be referred to as the server, the client, and the utility client, respectively.

To use the server, you create an empty directory and put a file called ACCOUNT_INFO with the servers, usernames, and passwords of the accounts you intend to use with MailTask in that directory. You then create the Tasks folder as well as */INBOX and */Sent, where * is every number from 0 up to but not including the number of accounts you put in ACCOUNT_INFO. You should also create an empty file called ADDRESSBOOK and a Tasks/BLACKHOLE file containing exactly the following:

Content-Type: multipart/x.MailTask;
 boundary="===============4405596723705947737=="
Date: Thursday, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 -0000
Subject: BLACKHOLE
X-MailTask-Type: Checklist
X-MailTask-Completion-Status: Incomplete

--===============4405596723705947737==
Content-Type: text/plain


--===============4405596723705947737==--

Finally, in every INBOX and Sent folder, create an empty file named UIDVALIDITY.

(There may be other empty files you need to create, but the error messages if you don't have them should be obvious.)

You then start the server in that directory, passing it two parameters indicating the ports you want to use to communicate with the client.

Each client, and the utility client, should be set up a similar way. See the source for the utility client for additional ways to configure the utility client; each user will probably have a slightly different use case for how to use the utility client and may even want to modify the utility client to behave differently. The utility client is a client, but it automatically creates tasks based on incoming emails, marks tasks done when they are finished, and can be configured to ignore certain accounts or folders.

Be aware that, by default, the server will mark all emails in an account as read when it first runs. You can change this behavior by changing the line MARK_MESSAGES_READ=True in server.py to MARK_MESSAGES_READ=False. Be also aware that it will take a VERY long time to download all emails the first time a client is run. For large accounts, it may be necessary to manually copy over the server's downloaded emails in these cases (contained in the */{INBOX,Sent} folders).

1. Python 2
2. FLTK / pyfltk
3. cPickle (falls back to pickle if not found)
4. ???

Anecdotal note about pyfltk: the easiest way to get this on Debian-based distros is to use the python-fltk package. Using pip with a requirements.txt file with pyFltk has been reported not to work.

I may add more documentation here later, but that's it for now. Enjoy!

Both server.py and mt_scrtry_rn.py are daemons that should always be running. So, do something like this from the shell:

cd $server_root_dir
screen -d -m /pathname/server.py 6666 6667
cd $utility_client_root_dir
screen -d -m /pathname/mt_scrtry_rn.py localhost 6666 6667

To actually use the program, of course, you then need to run the client. You can run as many clients as you want from as many different computers as you want. You need to set up the client's files in $HOME/.mailtask_data. $HOME/.mailtask_data/settings should contain the password to the server. Then run

/pathname/client.py servername 6666 6667

Note: You only need to run one server total -- all your clients should connect to that one server.