Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

["Michele A. Torzilli" <mtorzill earthlink net>]

Just wondering what this means for Balsa.  Balsa is, I believe, the
official GNOME mail client;  does this announcement mean the Balsa project
will be vigorously implimented, or are plans for an entirely new mail
client in the works.  And I do indeed agree that this area (perhaps along
with an integrated help system for GNOME apps) of  a mail client needs to
be developed.


Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> Hello guys,
>
>    So, I was watching the grass grow the other day, and it ocurred to
> me that the main medium of communications for the free software
> community is mail.  Is it our most valuable communication resource.
> Still I have not seen any mail program which is truely powerful,
> extensible and it is designed to address the needs of our community.
>
>    The mail needs of people these days are rather different from those
> some years ago: keeping up with high-volume mailing lists; keeping up
> with important people; being able to keep track of conversations;
> being able to easily archive messages based on various criteria; being
> able to automatically split mail in folders; being able to decode mime
> messages and render them nicely; being able to link the addressbook
> with corporate address book services; schedule appointments.
>
>    So we need to provide this powerful tool.  Now, given that the core
> of Gnumeric took only two months to develop and it was a rather solid
> and good piece of code, I am confident that we can tackle this project
> as well and do things right.
>
>    Now, what do we need to make this a reality?  Well, step number one
> is to make this project fun and reusing all of the nice code and
> infrastructure that we have developed over the past months.
>
>    Given that we are going to redo the Mail application for GNOME, I
> have a number of ideas on how to do this.  So this is sort of a call
> for volunteers that want to start working on such a beast.
>
>    We need various modules in this mail program.  Each module should
> be implemented as a CORBA object, exclusively because it allows us to
> upgrade different components and choose different implementations over
> time, without having to update the whole system.
>
>    Contextual operations are very useful, so we should use Button-3
> for context operations as much as possible.
>
> * Mail storage
>
>    This will handle the handling of the mail input backend, supporting
>    various existing setups: imap, pop, spool mail, Mailbox, MH. We can
>    steal the design for the interface from GNUS.
>
>    The mail storage should provide the mail splitting: applying all
>    the rules defined for separating the mail into different folders.
>
>    See [1] for more information.
>
> * Summary display
>
>    Summary display should allow people to list the messages in a
>    folder.  We should implement what most people expect from the
>    folder summary display, but on top of that we need that right
>    clicking on a message presents useful options about the message:
>
>         a. Increase the score for this author/thread.
>
>         b. Use this message as a "pattern" for automatically
>            creating a new folder.
>
>            So that users do not end up editing manually their
>            .procmail file, nor using a GUI to manually wonder
>            which header needs to be used for splitting.
>
>            We can get splitting right most of the time, so by
>            default we should be ablt to do a pretty good job.
>
>         c. Allow the user to auto-archive any conversation with the
>            person selected or to auto-archive a thread (ie, based on
>            Subject).
>
>    It should be possible from a message to see what the guy is
>    replying to with a single click.
>
> * Message Display
>
>    This should be clearly a full fledged display engine for all of the
>    new stuff we get on the net these days.  Integration with Bonobo for
>    displaying message contents would be excellent.
>
>    We can use Mozilla to render the display in the future, so a simple
>    renderer for now would do the job.
>
> * Tool integration
>
>    I suggest that the Message Display engine be decoupled by a clean
>    CORBA interface from the Summary engine and from the folder
>    engine.
>
>    We should integrate not only this, but it should integrate
>    seemlessly with the calendar and the addressbook (the addressbook
>    needs to be redesigned, because currently it is: not powerful and
>    not very nice).
>
>    The actual tools can be embedded with Bonobo (we can bootstrap with
>    this feature turned off, but eventually it will be like this), so
>    it will look like a big unified interface to the end user.
>
> * Why not improve an existing mailer program
>
>    There is too much baggage in existing mail applications that we do
>    not want to carry into the future.  Reusing parts of existing GPL
>    applications and mail applications should be fine, but I do not
>    think there is much to be rescued.
>
>    I would love to be proved wrong on this topic.  But the experience
>    of gnumeric has left a very good taste in my mouth: it is possible
>    to do so and it is possible to do this in a very clean fashion.
>
> * Developing this mail client
>
>    We need to split the work between hackers.  Each one choosing a
>    very specific task, so that we can paralellize as much as
>    possible.
>
>    Cordination will take place on the gnome-mailer-list@nuclecu.unam.mx,
>    to subscribe send mail to gnome-mailer-list-request@nuclecu.unam.mx
>    and put "subscribe" as part of your message.
>
> [1] Bertrand has been working in such a beast, perhaps we can reuse
>    some of his code.  I am just a bit concerned that the
>    implementation is in Objective-C, which means that people need an
>    objective-c compiler on their system to compile it.
>
> --
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--
Michele A. Torzilli
mtorzill@earthlink.net

The first step to knowledge
is to know we are ignorant.
         Socrates (470-399 B.C.)