I've been reading through the mass of documentation for Telepathy. My head hurts and I'm now painfully aware that smart geeks make for terrible documentation writers.

I had some very simple questions:
- how do I listen for incoming SMS ?
- how do I drop or delete a message ?

An hour later, I still don't know. Do I need to implement a Client.Approver interface? Should I just retrieve an existing one (how)? Considering that I'm using Python, can I simply use DBus calls? If yes, which ones?

I couldn't find straight answers to these questions, probably because I'm stupid. Everywhere it says in big letters to USE TELEPATHY but there are very few examples, and the simple ones actually use dbus calls (on objects which often don't support dbus introspection, btw).

So, the next person complaining about developers not adopting Linux technologies will be personally stabbed in the face

I haven't actually tried to do this but you should be able to simply hook to the DBUS signals for incoming messages (that's what I would try first based on my very cursory look at the APIs)

Edit: Once you figure it out please post some sample code

Telepathy documentation is poor at best, so it's not just you. I have tried to understand how to do similar things you mentioned and ended up using dbus straight.

have a look at TpSession, its a bit more simplified being a wrapper over Telepathy, but doesnt have a lot of the telepathy support yet.
Might help for now, documentation for telepathy, calendar-backed, modest and many more is quite a pain at the moment, seems like they chose to cut paste the header files there !

Its in the best interest of maemo for some action towards documenting.

@OP have you found the telepathy Wiki. You should be able to find the starting point for text mesages here.

Fargus, yes I have tried going through the wiki, but most of that looks written for people who want to fully implement their own protocol handlers, including that page. I don't. I just want to interact with the existing handlers.

Then it sounds as though you are going to need to look at the specific implimentation on the device you want to develop for, N900? Communication between modules is via DBUS messages so you should be able to catch this in Python but I don't use Python so can't say for sure. I beleive you should be looking for message showing recvd and check the type. Unfortunately I haven't looked into SMS on the N900 as I have particular interest, maybe someone else knowns the message type in question? Only other suggestion I can make is a small test program to display incoming data and send a text to yourself?

I would suggest that the documentation issue here is not Telepathy but for the custom protocol for SMS on the N900.