Triumvirate

ethan on 2004-05-08T05:15:56

Just received this email and am wondering now:

    Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 16:51:51 -0700
    From: RobertH 
    Subject: Your code

    Hello,
    I was cruising around the net looking for
    something specific and stumbled across
    a page with your stuff on it.

    Here is what we are looking for.

    We want to dynamically transport raw mail
    files into various email clients, such as
    Outlook, Express, Eudora and Netscape.

    Do you have such a code that would accomplish
    this task?

    Any help would be appreciated.


    Sincerely,
    Robert Hernandez
    Senior Executive
    Triumvirate Technologies, Inc.
    Creators of Mailbox Filter
    www.mailboxfilter.com
    www.triumviratetechnologies.com
    (888) 577-4942
    (626) 577-2259

Alright, I do have written stuff for email handling. On the other hand, he doesn't mention which page it was where he found my stuff on.

The interesting part is that Triumvirate Tech. is a commercial software vendor of anti-spam software. Now, they don't want code from me so that they can put it into their software which they sell for money, do they? Maybe I'll reply and ask inconspicuously for some details on what code they want and how they intend to use it.

Or maybe this mail is just spam that happens to look like non-spam?

Update: The mail was not spam. I asked for more detailed information and just received the reply. As it looks, they are writing their stuff in VB. What they want is delivering mail from an ordinary UNIX mail spool (which would most likely be mbox or mdir) to several mail clients directly without using POP3 on the client side. Essentially they want to convert mbox/mdir in one of the many proprietary formats used by Outlook Express and the lot on the fly.

---

consulting gig

mary.poppins on 2004-05-08T08:29:28

Sounds like a good opportunity for a consulting gig.

libdbx/libpst

gav on 2004-05-08T17:03:25

The only thing I've seen are libdbx/libpst . I've used I think these are read-only though.

The though of messing with Microsoft's undocumented, proprietary binary format gives me the willies.

Re:libdbx/libpst

ethan on 2004-05-08T19:14:29

I still remember my epic battle to make libdbx byteorder aware before I could wrap it into Mail::Transport::Dbx so that it could be used with Mail::Box (which explains the odd namespace).

This - and libpst - is indeed read-only. As far as I remember, write-access is not on their developers' agenda. They just weren't able to do a full reverse-engineering which would be required for that.

Re:libdbx/libpst

jplindstrom on 2004-05-09T01:04:22

So don't. Use OLE.

Re:libdbx/libpst

ethan on 2004-05-09T05:12:33

So don't. Use OLE.

OLE only works when the program is supposed to run on a Windows machine. Also, you need the respective application. For .pst files that would be Outlook which is not free and therefore isn't necessarily available.

Re:libdbx/libpst

jplindstrom on 2004-05-09T21:24:43

As it looks, they are writing their stuff in VB

So they seem to run Windows.

Why would it not necessarily be available because it's not free? Odds are they run it on their desktops already, it's a farily common e-mail client among default-minded people.