Re: [Evolution] UI Suggestions

[Dan Winship <danw helixcode com>]

> I was wondering if you've thought about making Evolution capable of
> running as a pure server-based app? By that I mean the option of
> making an IMAP server responsible for Calendar and Contacts as well
> as mail.

As Jeff said, we've been thinking more along the lines of having IMAP
for mail, LDAP for contacts, and something-as-yet-undetermined for
calendaring. (Eventually, CAP, but that hasn't been standardized yet.)
"IMAP as everything" has problems (since IMAP is just not designed for
that), but "Well, I have an IMAP server and I don't have an LDAP
server" is a plausible argument...

> As there are no standards in this area

There actually is an expired internet draft discussing storing
calendar info on IMAP servers. They added a LOT of new commands
though, to make things like shared scheduling work.

> You could make each of these messages an XML object

Everyone repeat after me. "XML is not a magic bullet." :-)

If you're storing stuff on an IMAP server, you want to store it as
MIME messages, because IMAP servers let you deal with MIME messages
very efficiently. For instance, if you use the "Date" header to store
the date of the appointment, then you can use the IMAP search
facilities to request all (and only) the appointments scheduled on a
particular day (or during a particular interval). If the data you're
storing has internal structure, you want to store it as a multipart
MIME message, because IMAP will let you fetch the various parts
separately. Etc.

> Sounds doable?

Many IMAP servers won't allow multiple connections from the same user,
so you would have to have the Calendar and Addressbook components
sharing the IMAP connection with the Mail component. There's currently
no way to do that, but there should eventually be CORBA interfaces to
the mailer, which would make that possible.

> a good/crazy idea?

Helix Code is not likely to implement anything like this any time
soon, but if someone else wants to work on it, we can answer any
questions you have about the code, help with problems, etc.

-- Dan