Re: [Evolution-hackers] Evolution Ideas for Future

[Rodney Dawes <dobey ximian com>]

Hi,

I just read this article and would like to comment on the individual
ideas. Some of them are pretty good. Others are OK, but have some
simple flaws. I'll take their ideas in order, as they come. :)

1) Floating PIM Pane

	This is something we definately need. It shouldn't really be
	"in" the application, per se, so much as a separate tiny desktop
	app, itself. Something more akin to Konfabulator/Karamba would
	be great. It would be a quick easy way to see what appointments
	and tasks you have for the day, as well as perhaps a quick
	summary of the amount of mail you have in selected folders. Or
	perhaps this could also be integrated as a module for GKrellm.

2) Split-view Message List

	Not sure why they say "in-box" here. Inbox is the correct 	english, and
is a special folder, so unless you are dealing with
	multiple IMAP accounts that aren't just converged into the same
	"Inbox", such as Mail.app on OSX does things. This would
	probably be a good thing for Evoluton to do as well, and would
	simplify the UI a whole lot. Adding multiple trees for e-mail
	folders at the top of the UI would not be hard to do, but could
	be rather ueseless without the new-style Outlook list widget.

3) Built-in Instant Messaging

	This really doesn't belong in a groupware client. The proper
	thing to do, would be to provide the necessary integration with
	an external IM client. Or, more preferrably, have a standard way
	of doing the integration so that any external IM client could be
	integrated. Shoving more crap in an already large and bulky UI
	is typically a surefire way to scare people off. Though, most of
	the things that are talked about here, could be done with an
	external app for IM. I'm surprised that Video Conferencing isn't
	mentioned here. It seems like something that would be very
	useful, and should be integrated as well... For what it's worth,
	I'm working on an IM client, specifically designed for total
	integration with Evolution, as well as working with the
	GnomeMeeting hackers to integrate with it, and to integrate it
	with some of the functionality in Evolution.

4) Calendar-linked Auto-reply

	This sounds really neat. I would love to see something like this
	go into Evolution. It probably wouldn't be very hard to do,
	either, especially with the calendar abstraction and nice
	filters.

5) Integrated PGP Encryption

	Evolution already does most of what is mentioned here. What we
	really need is to integrate key management into the addressbook,
	and maybe integrate some of the existing stuff a little better.
	This would make it pretty easy to manage keychains and encrypt
	and decrypt mail quickly and with the right keys.

6) Spam Auto-reporting

	Evolution can be integrated very easily with spamassassin which
	can do pretty much everything listed here. The only place where
	an issue of integration stands, is with providing a nice UI to
	do the Bayesian classification, and manual spam reporting, as
	well as white/black-listing addresses and things. Though I would
	love to see us get some UI in for this, with a backend
	abstraction, to allow those people who want to use bogofilter or
	something else, for their filtering. It would not be that hard
	to do, either.

7) Mouseover Contact Information

	Adding the ability to pop up a tooltip with basic information
	from a VCard, when the mouse is over an address in the "Sender"
	column is pretty simple. Extending on what was said in the
	article, we could pull a VCard attachment from the mail, if the
	person is not in your addressbook, and the mail has a vcard
	attachment.

8) Smart E-Mail Notification

	This is something that I hope I can do some things for, for the
	2.0 release of Evolution. The ideas in this article, are
	something that would be easy to do. The "Important" thing,
	depends on the mailer getting support for priority flag headers,
	though. Hopefully, I can get an external app to handle this,
	written pretty soon.

9) All-powerful Right-clicking

	Evolution already does pretty much all of this. Evolution also
	has VFolders, which doesn't actually move the mail, so the
	menus are more bulky than typical. Even without the VFolders,
	the context menus are still pretty large. I think it a better
	idea to work on simplifying the UI as much as possible. The
	context menus can still be powerful, even without as much stuff
	in them.

10) Easy-access Message Templates

	The e-mail templates in Evolution currently are only available
	for HTML e-mail, and you can't add your own, IIRC. Solving these
	issues, adding the ability to do the stuff mentionend here,
	would be pretty easy.

Bonus) P2P Document Sharing

	This is probably done better with some combination/integration
	method with Rendezvous, MultiSync, and possible one of the open
	p2p protocols.

-- dobey

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 15:55, Chris Woodruff wrote:
> I am new to the Evolution Hackers group and have been quietly reading all
> the posts for the last couple of months.  In this time I have been trying to
> find time to ramp up on Evolution development and standards.  I had this
> link saved from a while ago and thought it might have a few good points on
> the perfect email/PIM client.  Hope it helps.  I am also hoping to find a
> place in this project soon.  If anyone has any suggestions drop me an email.
> 
> http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-5020956-1.html?legacy=cnet
> 
> Chris Woodruff
> cwoodruff openpenguin com