A new direction for Hep
This morning I got an e-mail from Gary Benson, with a terrific idea, one that makes all my ideas for Hep fall into place: make Hep run as an email server, handling all the backend stuff while letting people use whatever mail client they like.
Implementing this won’t be hard, it will make Hep easier to maintain and it will make it instantly work in Windows and OS X. The only platform-specific bit will be the GUI configurator.
Here’s how it will work: You write your mail message and send it to the Hep server. Hep looks through the To: list, and pulls out any addresses for non-email accounts (for example, “myweblog@hep”). Then it delivers those messages to whever they’re supposed to go. If there are regular e-mail addresses in the list, Hep will forward them to a real SMTP server.
Hep will retrieve messages from various places on the Internet, just like it does now, and make them available through POP, so you can get them with your mail client. It will support viewing, editing, and deleting messages from weblogs and advogato diaries via IMAP.
I should have a new release of Hep ready by next week.
