Gnome Mail clients (Re: Is Balsa alive?)

[Bertrand Guiheneuf <Bertrand Guiheneuf inria fr>]

(This is nearly a FAQ now...)

Balsa is not dead until Stuart Parmenter, its main author, declares it as such.
Actually, development has stopped for about 3 months, but I am pretty confident
it will restart again.


As Empath (new KDE mailer) has been announced, I just wanted to say I am slowly
trying to write a new gnome mailer in Objective C. Before I could put it on
CVS, I have to finish the mail library which is basically influenced by
JavaMail, MAPI and the IMAP RFC. I expect to release a first version of
 the library and a basic client in 2 months. 
The first goal is to have a working mbox/pop3/SMTP but the library is designed
from scratch to be extended with "providers" so IMAP4 and nntp support  should
be only a question of time.

The client will hopefully, use bonobo to display the parts in Multipart Mime
messages, and the GUI will be something between Outlook and Balsa.
I hope it will be able to support disconnected operations via a CORBA 
link to gnome-ppp or any pppd  CORBA service for Gnome. (you know, those
corba services Miguel talked about recently - printer service - send mail 
service ....)

Conversely, the mail library which is 50% ready will be CORBAified and 
usable in place of libmutt in balsa.  

There is no need to start a thread about its name, the way this thing should
be coded or why JavaMail is better than MAPI or if I should have coded 
it in C++ ...
If you really want to help, just mail me, I can send you the tarball :)

Best regards, 

	Bertrand 

PS: Why did I choose to develop a new client:
(personal opinions only...)

- libmutt is very messy and must be replaced with a new libbalsa.
- libbasla is nearly innexistent (I mean as a mutt independant entity :)
and misses an good object/event model to rely on. 
- balsa GUI code is very very messy and has too much useless stuff.
It is OK to have dnd, filters, connection wizards, corba binding etc....
but only if the underlying mailer works OK. And this is not the case 
in balsa.