Re: GNOME plans (--> mail clients)

[James Green <gnome cyberstorm demon co uk>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Augusto Cesar Radtke wrote:

> 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)

Yep. In that department, OutLook isn't bad. MS has always been very good
at UI design imho.

> > - simple and easy to use

Yep, complex tasks should of course be available too.

> > - self-contained (it should not depend on fetchmail, procmail and others)

No, I disagree. Someone mentioned on gnome-list a few days ago about not
forgetting the powerful functionality which UNIX cmd-ln utils provide.
What needs doing is two-fold, something I might write-up soon, but
basically we need a decent software maintenance tool like RPM but with
Apt's intelligent "oh, new version is out" functionality, second we should
use these utils transparently in GNOME apps - the user doesn't need to
know that sed is used in a text editor or whatever, but you see what I
mean.

> > - secure (support for GPG/PGP is simple MUST, support for POP/IMAP over SSL or
> >   SASL would be nice too)

smtp?

> 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 ;

Agreed.

> - good design;
> - simple and fully documented;

Simplicity rules on the immediate front-end, but let's not forget powerful
Advanced functionality, possibly through plugins to keep footprint low and
speed up.

> - own mail fetcher, support for POP3/IMAP/APOP, others;

Hmmm. See above comments.

> - 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).

Yep yep and yep.

> 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:

Agreed. But we have to keep in mind that if something breaks and e-mail is
needed, the user is going to have to use pine or something which uses
mbox. Backward compatibility is a must. Maybe a module which, run thorugh
cron, could backup your mail directory system to the mxob fashion once a
week to keep backward compatibility?


-- 
James Green
http://www.cyberstorm.demon.co.uk/
Home of the demon.tech.modems 56k FAQ.