[Raion]

Greetings!

This is a little bit more of a formal thread and this is one that I would like to have some input from people from SGUG, so if somebody wants to speak on the behalf of the contributors who don't want to contribute here that's fine; I just want to try to include them in the conversation when possible. 

It's been pretty well established that we have been left behind in a number of areas and I want to tackle one of the more "easy" ones first with a new concept that I thought of. 

Let's discuss an ideal native email client. I have a suggested architecture, but let's go through the features that we might want in an ideal email client before we get into a discussion of architecture. 

Community members please discuss what features are crucial. For parity's sake and ease of use, I have a handful:

1. SSL/IMAP support. A lot of the older email clients only support pop which is kind of dated. SSL and TLS support are obviously quite necessary. 

2. Multiple mailboxes. Doesn't necessarily have to be like Mozilla Thunderbird or anything but we should have the ability to switch between them pretty easily, IMHO. 

3. Motif GUI. Judging by the hubbub that was around the Motif Netsurf and IRC clients I think this is pretty much a given for everybody.

Here's a few question marks, I suppose:

1. Should we support pop? I don't think there's any mail providers that really are around anymore that only support pop; but it might be preferred for people to use that and I just don't know. 

2. Is displaying HTML messages important?

3. RSS feeds or other integrations like you see with Mozilla Thunderbird or other common email clients?

4. GNUPg integration?

I'm obviously probably missing some of other people's features so please feel free to chime in at this point and tell me what I'm overlooking. 

Architecture for an email client

I obtained the idea for this from looking at the architecture of the transmission torrent client. Suffice to say that client has a useful feature where it can have a daemon running in the background and you can have everything from a web, command line interface or a curses interface. 

In order to be pragmatic about the development of this email client I think that it would be necessary to start in stages: 

Stage 1: daemon and library for various frontends. A reference frontend in the form of a curses-based user interface for email. 

Stage 2: a prototype Motif interface in Motif Lua so that we can more easily adjust and adapt it to people's preferences. Basically we build a reference design out and then later on port it to C or Viewkit C++ if necessary.

Stage 3: a web-based front end if necessary so that you can access it from other machines but this might not be strictly necessary. 

I think that this would be a pragmatic way to develop this because then you could also have customizable interfaces built around it and it could also have some widespread appeal from people outside of the community. But that's just my two cents on it and I would like to see people being included in the conversation because I've already decided that one of the future projects that we're going to embark on with TruHobbyist, Linear and all of the other amazing developers that have joined the community in recent years, is this. So if you want to be part of the conversation and the eventual design please step forward and I am more than happy to listen to people who actually know what they're talking about and tell me that I might be thinking about this the wrong way. I just want to continue to help the community in the best way I can until I am capable of developing such applications myself which is coming but pretty slow going because it takes time to learn all this stuff for yourself.