email client for app engine

Question

GAE supports both incoming and outgoing emails: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/

Have any open source email clients been written for GAE? Something that handles encoding issues, attachments, grouping by conversations, etc.

Hitt

Good question also makes me wonder if there's is a tool for managing email lists – Fremont

yes I would be interested in that too. All the apps I have found so far that use the mail API are trivial. – Hitt

ping here if you write your own. – Largely

Not that I could find, but webmail based on supported frameworks (like code.google.com/p/webpymail) should have part of the problem solved, leaving the GAE integration for you. – Haruspicy

I have built an email client on GAE as part of a helpdesk app. When I have time later I'll separate and open source the email part. Contact me if you're interested. – Hitt

Answer 1

I ended up writing my own helpdesk style app on GAE, with some basic email functionality. Working well so far.

Hitt

Did you liberate the sources? – Keitel

Answer 2

The Google App Engine SDK can send and receive email; however, there are certain limitations in place that would prevent an actual email client from being built:

• The App Engine receives email at the following address: [email protected]

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingmail.html

The problem I see with this is that you would need to have your users setup forwarding rules in their Google Accounts so that incoming mail is forwarded to your app using the above format. This means that they would need to rely on another email service, which would beg the question of what value yours would add over top of the existing service.

Sending is not quite so bad. The Google App Engine App can send mail on behalf of users logged in with their Google Account, so one could build an outbound email client using a user's Google Account.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendingmail.html

For receiving mail, there are instructions here on how to do that by forwarding mail from an existing email client. It is currently not possible to use your own domain to receive emails without forwarding:

Custom Incoming Mail Domain With Google App Engine

In summary, to answer your question, if someone has built an email client on App Engine, they have not made it public or done enough marketing to appear in search results. Even so, their implementation would be subject to the limitations described above.

Laryngoscope

yes I'd read the docs, and for my use case the incoming email restriction is not important – Hitt

Answer 3

If you are looking for a general purpose Web-based Email client like Horde to run on the App Engine I'd say you are out of luck yet.

GAE blocks all incoming and outgoing RAW Socket traffic; to access the outside cloud you need to use the URLFetch API, and it only allows you to access HTTP websites. So you can't talk POP3 or IMAP from your app, nor you can listen to SMTP traffic.

You'd need some intermediate service that relays POP3 or IMAP through an HTTP web service running on a server outside GAE, like a VPS, EC2, Rackspace, etc.

Gunsmith