New ideas for balsa

[Bruno Pires Marinho <bapm camoes rnl ist utl pt>]

I have been thinking and I had this idea to rewrite balsa in a way that
makes the program small and supporting many features. We can do this
because a user will not use POP, IMAP, NNTP, SMTP, etc at the same time.
We can also have many different ways to add protocols to the program.

This idea is just the middle ware between the front-end and the back-end.
We define a interface for plugins. Each plugin can handle a different
mailbox type. For instance, one plugin can handle POP with fetchmail,
other can handle POP with gnome-mail, other can handle local mailboxes,
etc. We just need to define the correct interface for the plugin.
Each plugin knows how to get mail, how to configure to get mail, how to
search on the mailbox, how to sort the mailbox, how to filter the email
and send it to other mailboxes.
We can also have another type of plugins to send emails. Each plugin a
different protocol.
Some of the functions can be shared between the plugins through a library
or something.

The plugins can be built using other solid programs that exist on unix
like fetchmail and procmail.

So the front-end just has to associate a plugin type to every mailbox it
manages.

Using this method we can easily add new protocols to the program.

                                               Bruno Pires Marinho
                                      http://camoes.rnl.ist.utl.pt/~bapm/