emailler/README-pop65.md
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Apple II Email and Usenet News Suite

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POP65.SYSTEM

Run using Open Apple-R in EMAIL.SYSTEM

POP65

POP65 is a Post Office Protocol v3 (POP3) client for the Apple II. It requires an Uthernet-II ethernet card and will not work with other interfaces without modification, because it uses the W5100 hardware TCP/IP stack. POP65 is used to download new email messages from a POP3 email server. (I use Dovecot on the Raspberry Pi as my POP3 server, but other POP3 servers should work too.)

Before running POP65.SYSTEM for the first time, be sure you have created the email root directory and the SPOOL directory, as described above. POP3 will initialize the INBOX mailbox, creating NEXT.EMAIL and EMAIL.DB files if they do not exist.

POP65 runs without any user interaction and performs the following tasks:

  • Detect Uthernet-II
  • Obtain IP address using DHCP
  • Connect to POP3 server using parameters from first three lines of EMAIL.CFG. (USER and PASS commands)
  • Enquire how many email messages are waiting. (STAT command)
  • Download each email in turn (RETR command) and store it in the SPOOL directory.
  • If configured to delete messages on the POP3 server, messages are deleted after successful download (DELE command)
  • Once all messages have been downloaded, disconnect from the POP3 server (QUIT command)
  • Scan each downloaded message in the SPOOL directory and import the message into INBOX:
    • Read INBOX/NEXT.EMAIL to find out the next number in sequence and allocate that for the new message.
    • Copy the message from SPOOL to INBOX/EMAIL.nn (where nn is the next sequence number) while scanning it for the following information:
      • Sender (From:) header
      • Recipient (To:) header
      • Date and time (Date:) header
      • Subject (Subject:) header
      • Offset in bytes to start of message body
    • Store all of the information obtained from scanning the message in INBOX/EMAIL.DB.
    • Update INBOX/EMAIL.nn, incrementing the number by one.
    • Iterate until all messages in SPOOL are ingested into INBOX.

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