bkirsch++!
On Feb 6, 2007, at 1:59 PM, Brian Kirsch wrote:
Hello,
Yesterday I checked in fundamental changes to mail in Chandler
which I would like to detail for you.
Overview:
===================
In our discussions we acknowledged that for Preview, Chandler
would not be a full out of the box replacement for traditional mail
clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook. Thus we needed a way for
users to take advantage of the great collaboration features
Chandler offers without forcing them to choose between their
current mail client and Chandler. With yesterday's check in, I
believe we have achieved this goal.
Although the check in includes many cool new features and
improvements the fundamental change is that Chandler no longer
downloads all email from an IMAP Inbox or a POP Server.
Instead, Chandler scans the IMAP Inbox and POP Server for Chandler
communications and downloads them. These are emails which were sent
from another Chandler user and contain specific mail headers that
the Mail Service uses to identify the communication. Chandler
emails can be plain text or contain ICal and EIML attachments to
support the Edit / Update workflow's and Event sharing.
While this solution works great for Chandler collaboration there
are times when a user receives an email from a non-Chandler client
that contains information he or she wants to bring in to Chandler
such as an invitation or task.
No problem, we have got this covered too!
This brings us to the concept of Chandler IMAP Folders. These are
folders, which on the users request Chandler, will create and
configure on the IMAP server.
The folders are as follows:
1. Chandler Mail - placing mail messages in this folder results in
Chandler downloading them and creating Items stamped as a MailStamp.
2. Chandler Tasks - placing mail messages in this folder results in
Chandler downloading them and creating items stamped as a MailStamp
and a TaskStamp.
3. Chandler Events - placing mail messages in this folder results
in Chandler downloading them, parsing in a locale aware manner the
subject and body for any date time information, and creating items
stamped as a MailStamp and an EventStamp.
I've been using the Chandler IMAP Folders for some time now and
they are an easy and productive way to get data in to Chandler.
IMAP
=========
As I detailed in the overview, the Chandler IMAP code now supports
Chandler to Chandler communications and Chandler IMAP folders.
Although we do not yet have UI the Chandler IMAP code actually
supports complete IMAP foldering. And for each IMAP folder can
contain the following configurations:
1. Only Download Chandler to Chandler messages
2. Download all Mail
3. Download all Mail and stamp as Events
4. Download all Mail and stamp as Tasks
5. Delete messages from the IMAP server that have been downloaded
to Chandler
6. Limit the number of messages downloaded to a specific number.
i.e. only download up to 300 messages from the folder
POP
========
POP works similar to IMAP and out of the box will only download
Chandler to Chandler communications.
However, it also has some advanced configuration features that we
don't yet have UI to support:
1. Only Download Chandler to Chandler messages
2. Download all Mail
3. Delete messages from the POP server that have been downloaded to
Chandler
4. Limit the number of messages downloaded to a specific number.
i.e. only download up to 300 messages
Putting it all together
===================
Much work has been done around making Sharing and Mail set up and
configuration easy for the user.
The number of new or improved features is large and is best
demonstrated in an Thursday OSAF All Hands demo.
I encourage everyone to play around with Account Preferences Dialog
and provide feedback on its ease of use.
New features include:
1. Folding of POP and IMAP in to an Incoming Account type
2. Auto Discovery
3. Chandler IMAP folder creation and removal
4. Improved account testing dialogs
5. Better interaction with SSL cert dialog
6. Save and Restore improvements including support for foldering
and restoring default accounts
7. Better form validation
Thanks,
-Brian
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