Jonasfj.dk/Blog
A blog by Jonas Finnemann Jensen


December 15, 2008
RaptorMail, an encrypting GMail client
Filed under: Computer,Linux,School by jonasfj at 2:30 am

Tomorrow, I’m finally turning in my P1 project, that’s the first semester project, at Aalborg University. The project is about RSA, and usability of encrypting email clients, and as a part of the project we’ve implemented an encrypting email client for GMail. In Python, with PyGTK and SQLite as backend, e.g. access mail while not online.

Anyway, I thought I’d publish the report here for anyone to stumble upon. Honestly it’s not that great, it’s written in English and is subject to some serious gramma issues, as we’ve been pretty busy actually getting it ready… For those who does not know what a P1 project at AAU is, it is a project conducted by a group of 4-7 students. Most of the education at AAU, happens through these kind of projects, which is kind of nice and gives a lot of freedom. But just for the record, I have not written the entire report myself, so do not blame me all the horror that may be found within it… 🙂

Enough about the report, during the project we also wrote an encrypting GMail client, called RaptorMail – don’t ask why. A GMail client is actually quite interesting, if I managed to find the time, it would be real nice to nail the last few bugs and integrate it with GPG… An application to access GMail through a non-webinterface while still maintaining the same feature set would be nice to have. And cacheing all mail for offline usage is an absolute killer-feature.

But I’m afraid I have a lot of other small projects on my mind too, so actually getting it out there is probably not going to happen. But if anybody is looking for a way to synchronize and interface GMail with a local database from Python the “gmail_cache” module I’ve written for this project is fairly comprehensive and well documented.

Leave a comment