Unifying gnome-mailer/gnome-mailcheck

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

I'm posting this message to gnome-devel, even though most of the 
current discussion on Miguel's proposed new mailer is taking place on 
gnome-list (and gnome-announce-list :)), because this is, at its 
core, a development question:

Several people have already asked what the relationship between balsa 
and the new gnome-mailer is going to be, and I have a related 
question: what do we want to do about the gnome-mailcheck (aka 
libmailcheck) project we talked about on this list last month?  I 
have a core of (still buggy) code in CVS, but it doesn't really make 
sense to duplicate the effort in both modules...  OTOH, 
gnome-mailcheck might be slightly further along then gnome-mailer at 
this point, if only because it has much more narrowly focused goals.  
(I asked about this earlier, and Bertrand indicated that he wouldn't 
want to hold up my work on the library for his mailer project; that, 
however, was before Miguel's announcement, and the transition to C 
for gnome-mailer...)

I see two main areas of interest.  The first, and most important, is 
the sharing of the "mail backends": that is, each project will 
probably need code to talk to POP3 and IMAP servers, read MH and MBOX 
folders, etc.  gnome-mailcheck only needs to be able to count 
messages, but particularly in the case of the remote mailboxes, the 
common network code might be reasonably substantial.

The second issue is the CORBA namespace.  Currently, the mailcheck 
interface is using GNOME::MailCheckServer and GNOME::MailCheckClient. 
 Should those move to GNOME::Mail::CheckServer and 
GNOME::Mail::CheckClient (or similar names)?  Does this level of 
hierarchy matter/help?

I'm going to keep plugging away at the mailcheck code, but before I 
start working with the actual mailbox formats, I'd like to have a 
better idea of where we're going with the mail libraries...

-Russell
-- 
Russell Steinthal
<rms39@columbia.edu>		Columbia College Class of 1999
<steintr@avnet.org>		System Administrator, AV-Network