I'm mailing! And I can't shut up!

This evening, I decided to take care of the more pleasant part of learning for my Internet Technologies exam: I wrote my own SMTP client. Well, I wrote it in Java, which means it was pretty much the same amount of work as writing the code to write a little formatted output to a text file, but hey, I *did* write my own mail-sending program that way.

Since I needed a little break, I then decided to write a POP3 client as well. And yeah, I cheated. I wrote it in Cocoa. Which means except for some Unix code to actually open a socket for the connection before packing it into an NSFileHandle, I had just as little to do as in Java. But it perfectly fine receives mail from my account and unpacks the raw header information.

Okay, POP3 is a little more complicated than SMTP, and neither of the apps does file attachments or Umlauts yet, but hey, I wrote a functioning mail client in one day. Including some nice wrapper classes that make all this stuff a lot easier. I'd love to do NNTP next, or maybe even a server ...

But actually, that's not on the list of things to learn anymore. So, what's left? XML-Schema, XML-FO, XSLT and a couple of other technologies that make me wish somebody had stopped that rabid XML-fox before he had the opportunity to procreate this madly.

I mean, whose nutty idea was it to create a programming language that uses the syntax of XML ???!