First lecture of computer networks. Let's shove all of these abbreviations with their meaning, and possibly a associated port number in one 1.5 hour lecture:

HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, TCP, IP, UDP, ISP, DSL, DNS, LAN, WLAN, WDM, P2P, TELNET, PGP, TLS, SSL, SSH, MIME, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, IANA, DHT, RTT, DHCP

I really feel sorry for students who didn't have previous knowledge about this stuff..

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

Going back home for the holidays means becoming tech support for pretty much the whole family, unluckly.

As soon as I enter my grandparent's home, my grandpa says "Could you print some emails?". I open his laptop, and I start sweating as soon as I see the Windows XP logo popping up. He (obviously) doesn't remember his password, and the only way to access his (mostly defunct) web mail service is Outlook 2003. For some reason, the web mail provider's POP3 server dies, and i spend half an hour trying to explain it. I ended up leaving with him saying "Why are you even going to a computer engineering university."

Ah, family.

Dear client. Your web development project budget has no room in it for me to help you fix your broken POP3 mail settings. May the odds be ever in your favor.

We just had the introduction lesson about Emails. I think our teacher had fun sending fake mails from his computer over the server under our name.

Note to anyone who is thinking about using Google Inbox:

Don't use that fucking stupid cuntbag of a tool for important email accounts. Even though it uses POP3 as Google states, it just permanently wiped all 2700 emails from the account via IMAP without any reason just after it was setup, so that even all the locally saved emails on all of our devices connected via IMAP were deleted. Go fuck yourself Google.

Question:
My application (web app & mobile app) needs to interface with a users email to read mails for further processing

Is there are library (py, js) or service that I can leverage that abstracts the access to the mail servers (IMAP, POP3, Exchange, Google API, Outlook API etc.) and provides a single interface (possibly REST API) to access the mails?

It feels redundant to implement each of the above methods of email access, as I see it being a feature in many applications out there, but I am not able to find a library or service that provides it.

Any advice or suggestions with implementing each of them is also welcomed

Thanks in advance

so, a new day, a new ERP software to rant about:

this one features an email feature (heh) but with a catch.

only pop3, no imap, if you want ssl the software suggest that you use a 3rd party program, also every user has to be logged in by the admin cause they assume the sysadmin knows all passwords cause he has "password lists"

i called them to ask why their software is what it is, they answer "there was never a need to develop an IMAP functionality, SSL would be so much work and it never became a problem that the sysadmin didnt know all passwords"

in unrelated news, does anyone know a nice sub 100K ERP software with CRM, Material Management and Offer/Order Management that runs on a local server and offers german support for a company in the 50 to 500 worker bracket?

What's the point of the Gmail API if you can do all of its functions with IMAP or POP3 and not have to have user login oauth, just account and password?

I wanted to read a company email account for certain emails related to our tickets. No one actually accesses this account, and the tool is without a GUI. As such, I can't use the Gmail API. I just remembered there must be a more ordinary way to do this because how does Outlook and other email software work? So python import imaplib and I was done in a few minutes.