Re: Some feature suggestions

[chris atlee 13075 <catlee globalserve net>]

Sounds like you've got some excellent ideas here.  These are things I'd
like to see:
Threading is VERY important.  Another feature somebody else mentioned a
while back was the ability to choose which threads from a
newsgroup/mailing list to download and which to delete/ignore.

Treat newsgroups like mailing lists; messages come into your 'inbox' and
are filtered accordingly (not all messages are necessarily downloaded, see
above).

Smart filtering system: when you have a message open or selected you can
click on a button to create a new filtering rule which has a bunch of the
choices filled in based on information from the current message.

That's about my wishlist.  If Balsa can have these as well as the things
below, it will be one kick-ass mail/news client!  I'm interested in
helping, but I'm not one for coding C (I prefer C++), but let me know if
you need a module done or something!

On another note, where can I find out more about the features of IMAP?
Many on this list have commented that 'IMAP does this', 'IMAP does that',
but I have little experience with anything other than POP.

Cheers,
Chris

On Tue, 18 May 1999, Jules Bean wrote:

> Right.  I got balsa CVS working - thanks all, especially Richard.
> 
> So - ways forward.  I'll start with some specific features I plan to
> implement, and then move on to more general ideas:
> 
> 1) SMTP mailing
> 
> I need this implemented before I can use balsa - I don't have a working
> local MTA (they're hard to set up, due to local CS rules). So this'll be
> my first job.
> 
> 2) IMAP improvements
> 
> My email access is exclusively IMAP, so this is where I expect to do
> most work.
> 
> a) Scan for folders:
> 
> I read about 30 mailing lists, in separate folders.  I'm damned if I'm
> going to add them by hand.  So balsa nmust be able to scan for folders
> (this is a simple IMAP command).
> 
> b) Check for new mail in every folder
> 
> As soon as this is implemented, balsa becomes more functional than
> netscape for me, since netscape can't do this, so I'll probably switch
> for almost all my email needs.
> 
> 3) Threading
> 
> Reading large mailing lists is *so* much easier with threading. 
> However, this isn't particularly easy to do - requires some design
> thought, to do it right,
> 
> 4) Modularise message sources
> 
> Balsa already has a reasonably modularised architecture, which is good. 
> However, it doesn't support everything that IMAP and NNTP need to work
> nicely.  Yes, I said NNTP.  I want balsa to read my news, too.
> 
> 5) Sophisiticated off-line usage
> 
> IMAP is a protocol designed with some very neat features for simple
> off-line usage, with the ability to synchronise the local message cache
> with the remote server, even though you may have logged in at work and
> deleted some messages.  To my knowledge, only netscape (out of the linux
> mailers) does this properly.
> 
> 
> Well... there's the kind of ideas I'm thinking about.  I have lots more,
> too - multiple personalities, cascading preferences - but they may have
> to wait.
> 
> First I have to familiarise myself with the code, anyhow.  But I thought
> a message like this might reassure people on the list that balsa isn't
> dying..
> 
> Jules
> 
> -- 
> /----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
> |  Jelibean aka  | jules@jellybean.co.uk         |  6 Evelyn Rd        |
> |  Jules aka     |                               |  Richmond, Surrey   |
> |  Julian Bean   | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk        |  TW9 2TF *UK*       |
> +----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+
> |  War doesn't demonstrate who's right... just who's left.             |
> |  When privacy is outlawed... only the outlaws have privacy.          |
> \----------------------------------------------------------------------/
> 
> 
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