Re: [gmime-devel] Putting GMime into Bongo

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 11:52 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> Hi GMime people,

Hello!

> 
> I'm interested in using GMime in the Bongo Project server 
> (http://www.bongo-project.org/ - slowly trying to make what was Hula 
> actually a reality ;), and I would appreciate anyone's thoughts on the 
> subject.

Sounds awesome :-)

> 
> At the moment, we've inherited some RFC 2822/MIME/etc. parsers which 
> mostly work but aren't the kind of code I sleep happily at night about. 
> Occasionally, it breaks and mis-parses a mail somewhere, leading to 
> things like empty Senders in IMAP clients. I've downloaded and looked at 
> GMime, and it's much better.

Haha, back when it was Hula at Novell, I had a talk with those guys at
lunch when I was out in Provo and they were interested in looking into
GMime, but I don't think they ever got around to it.

> 
> Is GMime suitable for use in long-lived daemons, and are there any 
> examples of people using it already?

DBMail (a free software imap server) is using GMime 2.2.x right now as
far as server software goes. There's also Balsa and Pan which use it on
the client-side and from what I've been told, Brazil's main ISP and
PennState U. both use it in custom spam-filters which filter all mail
that comes through.

>  Or would we be treading new ground 
> if we went this route? Are there any reasons why we might not want to 
> use GMime?

The only reason I can think of that you might not want to use GMime is
that GMime uses GLib memory allocators. For daemon processes, GLib is
probably frowned upon somewhat due to the way things like g_malloc() and
g_realloc() wrappers work - if the underlying malloc()/realloc() return
NULL, then they call abort().

So I guess it all depends on how Bongo currently handles out-of-memory
situations.

I've got to head out for my morning bike ride, but feel free to poke me
with any further questions you guys might have.

Jeff