Karim Hamidou

Kite status report 1

I get a lot of emails asking about my progress on kite, so from now on I’ll regularly share a quick status report.

I spent the last four weeks working on backend stuff, in particular:

  • Adding dovecot to the puppet recipe
  • Rewriting the postfix config
  • Setting up supervisor to monitor kite’s various daemons
  • Creating a thread indexing daemon


Adding dovecot to the puppet recipe

I’ve had a lot of requests for this one. Obviously, this is very alpha-ish, but it’s possible to read your email using an IMAP client. I’ve still got to figure out how to make filters play along with dovecot, though.

Rewriting the postfix config

I had a pretty insane postfix config where all the emails would be forwarded to an user using the always_bcc rule. Thankfully, I’ve set up a config which makes a lot more sense, using postfix virtual maildirs.

Setting up supervisor to monitor kite’s various daemons

Supervisor is a daemon written in Python used to monitor processes. I mostly use it to restart my daemons when they die.

I spent a lot of time on this one because initially I was using the stock supervisor version from debian. Unfortunately, it’s been heavily modified to suit the debian standards so it’s outdated and somehow broken. I also had to write an rc.d script because supervisor doesn’t ship with one.

Creating a thread indexing daemon

From now on, Kite will display emails grouped by threads. To do this, I’ve written a small program called filterdaemon.py. It uses inotify to find new emails and write them to an index file called threads_index.json. It’s a simple JSON list with metadata about threads.

For those wondering, I didn’t use a database because the emails are text files, so it makes sense to store metadata about the files in text files, too.

What’s next ?

The two big things on my list are:

  • refactoring the server to handle email threads. It should probably be ready by 2014.
  • easy vagrant setup. Trying kite in vagrant will be as easy as running “vagrant up” and connecting to 192.168.50.4.


Contact, questions, remarks

Send me an email at kite at this domain name (sorry for the obfuscated email, I haven’t setup the antispam yet).

Regards,

Karim