log4net vs MimeKit

Log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. In case of problems with an application, it is helpful to enable logging so that the problem can be located. With log4net it is possible to enable logging at runtime without modifying the application binary. The log4net package is designed so that log statements can remain in shipped code without incurring a high performance cost. It follows that the speed of logging (or rather not logging) is crucial. At the same time, log output can be so voluminous that it quickly becomes overwhelming. One of the distinctive features of log4net is the notion of hierarchical loggers. Using these loggers it is possible to selectively control which log statements are output at arbitrary granularity. log4net is designed with two distinct goals in mind: speed and flexibility.

MimeKit is an Open Source library for creating and parsing MIME, S/MIME and PGP messages on desktop and mobile platforms. It also supports parsing of Unix mbox files. Unlike any other .NET MIME parser, MimeKit's parser does not need to parse string input nor does it use a TextReader. Instead, it parses raw byte streams, thus allowing it to better support undeclared 8bit text in headers as well as message bodies. It also means that MimeKit's parser is significantly faster than other .NET MIME parsers (more than 25x faster than OpenPOP.NET and over 100x faster than AE.Net.Mail and MailSystem.NET). MimeKit's parser also uses a real tokenizer when parsing the headers rather than regex or string.Split() like most other .NET MIME parsers. This means that MimeKit is much more RFC-compliant than any other .NET MIME parser out there, including the commercial implementations. In addition to having a far superior parser implementation, MimeKit's object tree is not a derivative of System.Net.Mail objects and thus does not suffer from System.Net.Mail's massive limitations or bugs. API documentation can be found on the web at http://www.mimekit.net/docs For those that need SMTP, POP3 or IMAP support, check out https://github.com/jstedfast/MailKit.