Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Overview of the Implementation

All the code for Sherlock is stored in the code/sherlock directory in the code available from the book’s home page.^[46] This section provides a high-level overview of the implementation. The main stages in processing are as follows:

Initializing the data store

sherlock_mail:ensure_mail_root/0 is called at the very beginning. This routine ensures that the directory ${HOME}/.sherlock exists. We’re going to store all data under a directory called ${HOME}/.sherlock/mails; we’ll call this directory MAIL in the following text.

Fetching the mail index

The first step is to fetch the data at http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/. This is done using the inets HTTP client, which is part of the Erlang distribution. ...