a gnome mailing agent

[Alexander Peuchert <peuc peuchert de>]

Hi everybody,

so here are my thoughts to the mailer issue:

I'm not very into the internals of Gnome, but haven't heared anything
about something like a system wide database. As Gnome supports Corba this
would really help from inventing the whell the eleventh time.

I mean if we can have a database where all user data is stored and some
kind of inter-application protocol we wouldn't have to think about an
address book capability concerning the new mailer. We just would transfer
that to an addressbook app ... same for calendaring and that stuff.

Now for the mailer:

I see a good email app in a client-server way. We should have a mail
retrieval database server somewhere on the web. It fetches all mail,
stores it into some kind of database indexing it and when we want to read
our mail from work, a mailer client is used. The mail is kept in the
database, so we don't have to worry about disk space anymore.

Next day we fly to Southafrika carring our PDA( running Unix and GNOME)
with us. We access the mail server through the net and can read all mail
just like at the work ( or home ... ).

Now you can say that IMAP is capable of all this. That's true, but IMAP is
still some kind of >mailbox< server. You got an account and some mailbox
with it. If we can build a mail database server and make it accessable
through Corba, this would be a more gnomic approach. 

The database implementation would also provide a way out of the mailbox
problem. At the moment I have subscribed to about 30 mailing list and can
keep up with them anymore( especially if a thread like this one is started
:-) ).In a database you would only define a mailbox profile:

new mail from gnome.org the last five days concerning a new mailer

or

where's the mail I sent to ABC@xy.com last thursday?

If this would be transparent to the user newbies would't have a problem
either.

The client-server approach would also allow very slim client, where the
focus could lay on an easy user interface.

Comments are welcomed ...

alex

Alexander Peuchert
mailto:alexander@peuchert.de
http://www.peuchert.de ( not very interesting yet ;-) )