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poGmail: feeding of Gmail

It took me forever to give birth to my February 2006 but soon realized that it would be a huge job as .NET CF is missing a lot of the features used by the Gmail API. Fixing some of the bugs in the API and using the Mono  source as a reference, I first got a version working on the PPC a couple a weeks ago.

Or at least I thought it did. It works perfectly on the PC but it frequently fails with a https error on the devices I have tried (iPaq 4150 and iPaq rw6815):

 _HResult -2146233079 int
 InnerException {"Procedura di convalida con il certificato remoto non riuscita."} System.Exception {System.Net.WebException}
 Message "Procedura di convalida con il certificato remoto non riuscita." string
 StackTrace "in System.Net.SslConnectionState.PerformClientHandShake()\r\nin System.Net.Connection.connect()…

A program that only works when the sun is shining is not worth releasing so I put it on the shelf until Michele reminded me of the RSS feature in gmail.

Eureka! Why suffer the risks of the Gmail API web scraping when I can use an official RSS feed that does everything for me?

I threw away the old code and implemented the first release of poGmail this weekend. It is simple and small (64kb) and implements the features I need:

• Zero installation; just run the .exe. It creates a XML configuration file in the same directory as the .exe the first time you run it. Copy them both on a USB key to use it from anywhere :-)


• Hold the mouse cursor over the notification window to pause the notifications


• Click the subject in the notification window to read the mail


• Automatic selection of proxy based on the current IP. Use a regular expression like 192.168.* if you are using DHCP.


• It works with Google hosted domains

It is free so use it if you like it and let me know if you have any suggested improvements or find any bugs.

Almost all the code is shared between the Pocket PC and PC projects so the only hurdle left is integrating a .NET CF 2.0 project on the Today Screen on Windows Mobile. This article by Microsoft has a complete wrapper system based on Embedded VC 4.0 but it is fairly complex so I think I will code a lighter version.

Thanks cuzZle for giving poGmail a try and finding the first bugs!