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Peter Bhat Harkins
Hard Lessons
Having worked on email-related code before, I have been morbidly fascinated by one of the founders of handmade.network writing an email client. Handmade Network is trying to reinvigorate programming by emphasizing small teams and from-scratch performant code. It’s a great way to write small, self-contained projects (games, libraries, utilities) that can be done, but fell out of favor two decades ago for complex user-facing software.
This update included a few sentences I’ve been waiting for:
The biggest lesson is that not everyone is RFC-compliant. It was a shock seeing some companies accept ill-formed e-mail addresses, developers showing their best-but-still-inaccurate regular expressions for compliance, and security agents from company’s mail servers trumping simple IMAP requests that should have yielded a proper response, but didn’t. Look, I always knew commercial software packages don’t fully adhere to a spec—not even language compilers achieve 100% accuracy—but seeing violations led to unfortunate wrinkles and hard-coding in specific recovery points when I try to talk to some servers.
From what he lists, he’s only seen the tip of the iceberg. For example, he hasn’t mentioned some of the fun problems of IMAP or talked about the woes of email encoding and attachment. Specifically, this strategy of “seeing violations led to unfortunate wrinkles and hard-coding in specific recovery points when I try to talk to some servers” is really, really not going to scale. C is a tough language for the tower of abstractions he’s going to build and rebuild in the face of unexpected inputs and dusty corners of the spec.
And email is a particularly hard domain because it’s old and *looks* simple, so there’s an incredible amount of errors you have to cope with from version 0.1. Users will never accept “Yeah, you just can’t read email from people using Outlook, it’s Microsoft’s bug.” And then on top of all that, many emails are shifting to HTML-only with increasing expectations of CSS support and you’re implementing or talking to a huge browser engine. Email was a big factor in ending my support for Postel’s maxim.
It might be another 5 months before I reach a working prototype for that [GUI], and probably another two months of polish before I consider the possibility of releasing some build publicly.
I wish him a lot of luck and there’s a tiny, windmill-tilting bit of me that hopes he’ll succeed, but I’m watching this race for the crash.