PyMailCGI

A POP/SMTP Web Email Interface

Version 2.1 (Alpha), February 2006


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Overview

[Book Cover] This site implements a simple web-browser interface to POP/SMTP email accounts. Anyone can send email with this interface, but for security reasons, you cannot view email unless you install the scripts with your own email account information, in your own server account directory. PyMailCgi is implemented as a number of Python-coded CGI scripts that run on a server machine (not your local computer), and generate HTML to interact with the client/browser. See the book Programming Python, 3rd Edition for more details.


Notes

Caveats: PyMailCgi 1.0 was initially written during a 2-hour layover at Chicago's O'Hare airport. This release is not nearly as fast or complete as PyMailGUI (e.g., each click requires an Internet transaction, there is no save operation or multithreading, and there is no caching of email headers or already-viewed messages). On the other hand, PyMailCgi runs on any web broswer, whether you have Python (and Tk) installed on your machine or not.

Also note that if you use these scripts to read your own email, PyMailCgi does not guarantee security for your account password. See the notes in the View action page as well as the book for more information on security policies.

New in Version 2: PyMailCGI now supports viewing and sending email attachments for a single user, and avoids some of the prior version's exhaustive mail downloads. It only fetches message headers for the list page, and only downloads the full text of the single message selected for viewing.

New in Version 2.1: Deletions perform server inbox synchronization tests to ensure that the mail displayed is the only one deleted. In rare cases, the inbox may change in ways that invalidate message numbers after mail is fetched. 2.1 makes deletions safe, but index lists may still become out of synch.

Also see:

  • The PyMailGUI program in the Internet directory, which implements a more complete client-side Python+Tk email GUI
  • The pymail.py program in the Email directory, which provides a simple console command-line email interface
  • The Python imaplib module which supports the IMAP email protocol instead of POP


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