Creating accounts for the current default platform implementation

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

The #1 most asked question of tinymail is how to create an account.

While that question basically tells me the person who's asking the
question is *not* a developer, and therefore is per definition not
interested in what tinymail *is* (it's a framework for developing thin
E-mail applications), I'll nevertheless explain it. 

Once.

I always explain people to read the tny-account-store.c file in
libtinymail-gnome-desktop because first, that forces them into reading
source code. And that, I hope, might inspire them to read more source
code and perhaps fix problems and/or implement features. 

Many people, today, think tinymail is going to solve their E-mail pro-
blem on their desktop. Tinymail is not that. An application build on top
of tinymail, might just do that. People on this mailing list already
know this, I know. But I need this one archived so that I can point
people to it.

If you, as an application *user*, now hate me for that: I suggest or you
pay a developer to build an E-mail application for you on top of tiny-
mail. Or you learn some basics about programming,and do it yourself.

It's not *that* difficult. And you, you are just being a lazy whiner
wanting *me* to develop for *you* and *your* needs. You can of course
pay *me* or subcontract me to explain your developer how to do it.

Tinymail sure is about LGPL and GPL and is indeed free in all imaginable
ways *free* can be interpreted. Free as in free speech and bla bli bla.

But it's *not* about telling *me* what I should code for *you*. It's
about allowing *you*, or *your developer* to in a quick and easy way
code whatever *you* need. And its focus is, at this moment, trying to be
a great such framework for modern small devices with perhaps few memory
and slow cpus.

So in all imaginable ways, is *this* method flawed. Because the Tny-
AccountStore implementation, which reads this configuration, uses GConf.

This is a library that might *not* be installed on your small device.
And it's implemented in a "desktop" version of the platform library.
Whereas tinymails intention is, at this moment, not a desktop
application. It's not even intended to *be* an application. What you
people are *seeing* is the *demo* user interface for the framework.

So all the many questions about when tinymail will be usage for *you*
and *how* to configure an account, are stupid off topic questions.

Your intentions, if you asked it that way, are probably to *use* the
demo-ui of tinymail. Else you would probably have *read* the source code
yourself ... since *that* part of the source code, is *the* part *you*
have to implement yourself.

This is how you do it (*for* the libtinymail-gnome-desktop platform
implementation. *NOT* for ALL such -- future -- implementations):

gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/cache_dir -t string .tinymail
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/count -t int 1
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/proto -t string imap
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/type -t string store
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/user -t string [username]
gconftool-2 -s /apps/tinymail/accounts/0/hostname -t string [mailserver]



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be