IMAP

I'm an idiot.

No, seriously, this is a lesson I just keep learning.  I've been working with email - not as a user, but as a programmer - since 1999, and I've never really taken the trouble to look closely at the IMAP specification.  And because I failed to do that, I've never really fully appreciated just what a perfect synchronization protocol it really is.

Need an email assistant?  Use IMAP.  You can run your usual email client against the server and have a separate assistant application watching the same server.  Delete a mail on one, it gets deleted on the other on the next synch.  You can add messages to the Inbox, even!

For a couple of years, I've toyed with automating Thunderbird to do this kind of assistant task, but automating Thunderbird is needlessly complex and I've just never taken the time to try it.  Now I don't have to!  I can continue to use Thunderbird against my mail server while writing a Perl assistant based on Mail::IMAPClient - problem solved!

So.

I'm an idiot.