Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

switchboard.spatch.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

#31

Post by makeshifthoop »

fit2rule wrote: post #28
jtmoulia wrote: post #7

I worked with Spatch to make Switchboard, and will be around to answer any questions. Our motivation in building and continuing to build Switchboard is to make it easier for developers to process emails. Looking forward to more ideas!

Thanks for the nice product, and well done on a polished release - I've been playing around with it for a few minutes and I'm finding that its not only a great tool, but I'm learning erlang to boot. :) Since I sent my first email in the 80's, I've wanted to build business-logic systems with mail-based interfaces - things like, have an address such as "calendar@mydomain.com" which can be cc'ed on emails which might co…

It should work very well for specifying the logic around the calendar example: Switchboard would accept the credentials of the accounts to monitor, e.g. calendar@mydomain.com, and then notify a "schedule notification" worker of new messages. The burden of scheduling reminders for participants would be on the worker, but there are a lot of tools for that. I like the idea!

One note: Switchboard is especially useful relative to a bare IMAP connection when you're monitoring many accounts. This is because it provides a lot of the boilerplate around restarting failed connections and issuing IMAP commands while an IMAP connection has an active IDLE continuation.

I agree that there's tons of room for more automation around emails. I think the lack of automation is due to not having high-level tools, which is where Switchboard comes in, and that emails are typically natural language. I'm personally excited to see Switchboard get used for email classification -- imagine if your business-logic could include the email "class", e.g. "sent by a human", or "marketing", ... etc. A bit like Gmail's categories, but open and accessible to developers.

Re: Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

#33

Post by makeshifthoop »

joshdance wrote: post #32

Looks great. Any future plans for implementations or API in other languages?

Currently, there are worker/client implementations in Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. New languages can be added in response to demand -- is there a language you'd be interested in using on the client-side in particular?

Also, because it uses JSON over websockets, it's fairly easy to implement a new worker/client that follows the Switchboard interface -- here's the Python implementation in 132 LOC: https://github.com/jtmoulia/switchboard-python/blob/master/s...

Re: Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

#34

Post by fit2rule »

makeshifthoop wrote: post #31
fit2rule wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the nice product, and well done on a polished release - I've been playing around with it for a few minutes and I'm finding that its not only a great tool, but I'm learning erlang to boot. :) Since I sent my first email in the 80's, I've wanted to build business-logic systems with mail-based interfaces - things like, have an address such as "calendar@mydomain.com" which can be cc'ed on emails which might co…

It should work very well for specifying the logic around the calendar example: Switchboard would accept the credentials of the accounts to monitor, e.g. calendar@mydomain.com, and then notify a "schedule notification" worker of new messages. The burden of scheduling reminders for participants would be on the worker, but there are a lot of tools for that. I like the idea! One note: Switchboard is especially useful rel…

So Switchboard will basically take the IMAP pain away so I can focus on the business logic? Great!

I'll play with it .. hope you won't mind if I contact you in a week or so in case I have questions or maybe even to give you feedback/demo of what I've come up with in the meantime..

Re: Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

#35

Post by makeshifthoop »

angersock wrote: post #29
buf wrote: post #6

I did a project like this a few years ago and here are my takeaways: 1. Building on top of IMAP is very difficult. It's not a technology that is really designed for the mobile world of today (e.g. streaming, sockets for chat) 2. Threading is a bitch. The old folder tree layout is formidable. ---------------- That said, it's so cool to see something like this in the wild. As an engineer, I would've used this as a boil…

Interesting article about message threading: http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

That article is a classic, and is used by most people I've talked to implement threading if they can't rely on the IMAP server supporting the THREAD extension [1].

However, it also serves as an example of some of the complexity that clients are expected to handle to provide a modern email experience. That algorithm isn't trivial, and reimplementing it with every client is expensive in development time, and error-prone.

As mentioned in a sibling comment, the Switchboard server's roadmap includes making it thread aware, leaving Switchboard clients lean.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256

Re: Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

#36

Post by sandGorgon »

mickhagen wrote: post #27
sandGorgon wrote: post #24

Does anyone know how this compares to Lamson (which has been around for quite some time) ? [1] http://lamsonproject.org/

Lamson is an SMTP server which acts as the gateway for emails from the outside world to be put in your mail store. Switchboard doesn't have any direct connection to SMTP. It monitors changes in your mail store using IMAP IDLE and issues events to workers which can then do basically whatever your heart desires. (btw, we host our switchboard mailing lists on librelist.com which is a showcase for Lamson. cool project)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Lamson enables those hooks/workers as well - but integrates with an FSM and a queuing mechanism (Celery) to get this done.

Additionally, there is Apache James (Java) which does something similar.

Re: Show HN: Switchboard – open-source email processing in Erlang

#38

Post by jtmoulia »

sandGorgon wrote: post #36
mickhagen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lamson is an SMTP server which acts as the gateway for emails from the outside world to be put in your mail store. Switchboard doesn't have any direct connection to SMTP. It monitors changes in your mail store using IMAP IDLE and issues events to workers which can then do basically whatever your heart desires. (btw, we host our switchboard mailing lists on librelist.com which is a showcase for Lamson. cool project)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Lamson enables those hooks/workers as well - but integrates with an FSM and a queuing mechanism (Celery) to get this done. Additionally, there is Apache James (Java) which does something similar.

You're correct that Lamson provides tools for processing emails, but it doesn't include a mechanism for feeding it emails from IMAP servers. Switchboard actually complements Lamson -- Switchboard could manage IMAP connections, collect incoming emails, and feed those emails to Lamson. You'd be able to use Lamson in front of Gmail/Yahoo/etc

I'm not super familiar with Apache James, but it appears to be a mail server with pluggable components. Switchboard fits in as a layer between any mail server that supports IMAP, and its version of pluggable components [processes connection over the interface].

Thanks, this really helps us see where the documentation needs to be improved :)

Post reply on HN