Re: GNOME plans (--> mail clients)

[Augusto Cesar Radtke <bishop sekure org>]

On Sun, 19 Sep 1999, Lubos Gelo wrote:

> I feel that email killer-app for Gnome should be:
> 
> - good looking (design and look is VERY important)
> - simple and easy to use
> - self-contained (it should not depend on fetchmail, procmail and others)
> - secure (support for GPG/PGP is simple MUST, support for POP/IMAP over SSL or
>   SASL would be nice too)

Sometime ago I started a same project, I called it Gizmo, and the
principal things that I think about was:

- new mailbox style ; the old huge mbox is big and slow ;
- good design;
- simple and fully documented;
- own mail fetcher, support for POP3/IMAP/APOP, others;
- filters;
- plug-in system;
- mail box compression;
- mail box encryption;
- address book;
- multiple signatures;
- multiple mail accounts;
- panelize and background mail fetching;
- mail backuping and restore (I never saw a client with this feature).

The several point of a mail client, it his fetching and storage mail
scheme, the old mbox storage scheme is bad. Is slow, and very pathetic
structured. I have in mind a new scheme, every mail folder is a directory,
and every message is a file, the name of file is a hashed string, every
mail folder have one index file, when the client open a mailbox it don't
open that huge mail file, but the index. The index should contain certain
informations, like:

- what is the file that store the message;
- the messsage sender;
- date and time of message;
- message size;
- is compressed? ;
- is encrypted? ;


The second point of a mail client, it his fetching scheme, should be fast,
realible, support multiple protocols, security and compression.

These points should be implemented in the gnome-mailer core, the filter
schemes too. I will make a spec of these ideias in this week, and mail to
the list as well. Any comments of these schemes? GNOME need a good client,
so the core mail libs should be usable fast.

   -augusto