Re: [Evolution] email as alarm type

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

On Tue, 2001-11-20 at 00:07, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Wed, 2001-11-14 at 09:19, E. Joshua Rigler wrote:
> > Knowing that some of the original developers of gnomecal also work on
> > evolution, and since evolution is an _integrated_ email/calendar/etc.,
> > it seem a little odd to me that there is no option to email a reminder
> > to someone.  I could run "mail", but I could do that with a "cron" or
> > "at" job.
>
> We decided to postpone this functionality as it would involve changes to
> the message composer's CORBA interface and we do not have time to do
> that for 1.0. It will be implemented in the near future, though.

[ The following discussion obviously cant apply to 1.0, as the tree is 
  frozen, but I argue that we should go the simple way rather than using
  the Message Composer 
]

You do not really need to use the message composer to send an email
(specially, since you want emails to be delivered independently of
whether you are running evolution or not).

The only advantage of using the composer is that the message could be
archived in your `Sent' folder.  But reminders for alarms are not really
like messages you typed to mail yourself, so the value of keeping a copy
in the Sent folder is diminished.

On the other hand, using plain sendmail to fire off a message would
enable this scenario to work, and it also enables a lot of
functionality, for example you can send an SMS message or a page to your
cell phone to remind you of an important appointment.

Putting things in the balance:

Simple Sendmail Delivery:

        * Enables paging scenarios.

        * Enables easy-to-configure notifications (anyone knows how to    use
email)

        * Can not currently be logged/archived appropriately 

        * Requires little work, tested code is available in GnomeCal
          and probably in earlier code bases of Evolution.

        * Does not need Evolution running.

Message Composer approach:

        * Requires some amount of fresh CORBA work

        * At this point, it likely requires the shell to run, so 
          it depends on components being reusable without the shell.

        * Would get archival of "alarms"

I claim that the benefits of using the simple sendmail delivery
mechanism out weights the disadvantage of not being able to archive the
outgoing alarm messages.

My vote is to implement for post 1.0 the sendmail mechanism

Miguel.