White Rabbit

White Rabbit is an elementary email program built in C. Compilation will provide one executable for a server and another for a client. A variety of commands can be run with the client executable to communicate with other people connecting to the same server.

The project name is inspired by the "follow the white rabbit" scene from The Matrix. Email was cooler when it was done through the terminal, and The Matrix would've been a much more boring movie if Neo was using Gmail.

This project is built on the following principles that I believe will eventually make it better than Gmail:

• Fast server response time
• No bloatware in the client application. Easy to use, no unnecessary features, no cluttered GUI, and not taking all eternity to open the inbox.
• Security (work in progress) and data privacy (in contrast to Gmail)
• Freedom to write emails however you want. Markdown, html, any file can be sent as an email. Users should not be confined to writing emails using a nausea-inducing GUI that only lets you send certain types of content.

To use this project on your own machine, simply run the following commands

git clone https://github.com/ChancellorCeti/white-rabbit.git
cd white-rabbit
make

For a detailed description of how to use the client, run

./client.out help

For a quick demonstration of basic features, do the following:

In one terminal window, cd into the cloned directory and run

mkdir db
mkdir db/emails/ && mkdir db/users/
touch db/main_db.txt && cat "0" > db/main_db.txt
./server.out

and in another, cd into the cloned directory and run

./client.out create_user username password
./client.out create_user test_recipient password2
./client.out send_email username password test_recipient subject_line name-of-file-you-wish-to-send
./client.out get_inbox recipient password2
./client.out get_outbox username password
./client.out dl_email recipient password2 0
cat 0.txt