Celeste

calendar Aug 17, 2006 · 2 min read  en blog-objectsrootcom  · ant apple arc bad code development email engine example giovanni google http list reader sage script smart squeak steve system test tutorial ui vi  ·
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Celeste

Celeste is a mail reading and organizing program. The name "Celeste" is a reference to an earlier mail reader named Baba, which was written at Xerox PARC by Steve Putz and John Maloney.

Nowadays, Celeste is maintained by Giovanni Giorgi (me).

Latest Feature

A new revision is planned for the end of September 2006, and code name will be "Sonic". Sonic will include a smart mailing-list filter and a better "leave message on server" option. I implemented years ago an auto-filtering system in AppleScript. The filtering engine used the RFC2369 and some other tricks to detect yahoo mailing list. Sonic will have also an auto-filter for google mailing list too.

The leave message on server option is quite bad now. It creates a lot of duplicated messages.
The new implementation will avoid dowloading twice a message, using a mix of messageId and timestamp to detect duplicated messages.

Version policy

I have found a misleading versions for celeste. Celeste uses a "versionString" to mark a version in every sent email. versionString labelled something like 2.currentChangeset.
As far as I started mantaining Celeste, we used a lower version (for example 1.23).
To avoid confusion I have started to renmbering all the stuff starting from revision 3.0.

Anyway, the version name is the first thing you should consider. I plan to do very few releases.

Celeste Auto Filter Capability (BETA)

Some busy users subscribe and unsubscribe to a lot of mailing list. Managing them with filter is possibile, but can be done only by hand. Worst, email programs tend to be very slow if a single folder is full of stuff, and this can be true for Celeste too.

The Celeste Auto Filter option will enable a smart archiving system, packing the email in seasons. For instance "2006Q1-squeak-dev" will contain all the emails of squeak-dev of the first three month of 2006 (=the first quarter).

The Auto Filter will understand YahooGroups, Mailman and GoogleGroups mailing list, auto-dispatching them to the right category.
The filter will be enabled by default.

Downloads

You can find released versions on SqueakMap and development versions on SqueakSource.

Old resources: