Gmail through JavaMail
So I had this brilliant idea… instead of messing around with the Gmail RSS feeds that were giving me so much trouble, I’ll just access the mailbox via POP3 and that’ll be that. Well, it almost worked. Except that you have to manually enable POP3 support in Gmail, and the overall experience can be a bit flaky.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I was well into the rewrite of gcheck to use JavaMail (the GNU Classpath variety to be exact) by the time I realized this, so I’ve already made the app dependent on the code. So instead of hacking it all up into pieces again, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and implement a Gmail class for JavaMail using ROME for all the RSS work. Unfortunately, since I can’t get full email bodies, headers, or a number of other important things through the RSS feed, I won’t be able to contribute the code to the GNU folks working on Classpath since it would be a horribly broken implementation of a protocol. But it’ll be easy enough to include it in an app and have it work transparently with JavaMail (as long as you’re aware of its restrictions).
I’ll try and remember to post updates here in the event that anyone out there but me happens to have need of it.
