Sheila Mooney wrote: > Some options for bridging the gap between the desktop and existing email > clients that have came up so far are... > > + Emailing items to a collection on Cosmo ie: Send a /Event to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > + Drag and drop emails and attachments from other email clients. > + Pull down emails that have special headers. > + Handle a one-time import of an Inbox > + Subscribe / Sync to select IMAP folder(s) ie: Inbox, manage design > list in the desktop. > + The desktop as an IMAP client > + The desktop as an IMAP server > + RSS in and RSS out via desktop/web access
Implicit in many of these scenarios is the "IMAP account". How do we envision the specifics of that account? Many users no doubt will have a personal email account from an ISP which provides IMAP access and will wish to use that. I fall into this camp (where I'm the ISP). Are there parameters around what sort of accounts we wish to support? I know there's some history around the issue of "which IMAP servers we support". Concerns about full-scale integration with the variety of IMAP servers out there helped scale back our desktop email client plans for Beta. But Chandler does some IMAP today, including most everything needed to talk to a wide range of servers. Will we just publish a list of servers we've had reports of successful integration? There's also been some discussion that perhaps the Hosted Service should provide email accounts for people. It's not an unreasonable idea, though it's not obviously a must-have either. Could we discuss at this point more about the scenarios envisioned where Hosted Service-provided email accounts provide a Beta should-have kind of value? There's a pretty wide variety of users that don't have a convenient IMAP account. Webmail users, corporate users which require something like a VPN to connect to the IMAP servers that are provided, the 98% of email accounts (as we've heard from experts) that are primarily POP usage, etc. Are these people the ones we'd try to reach by providing email accounts ourselves? What do we expect our casual collaborators to be using for email mostly? Do they need Hosted Service email accounts? Will a casual collaborator, by their nature, bother with a provided account? What do we expect our hub/busy-body users to be using? Do they need Hosted Service email accounts? Are there any features envisioned which would require a Hosted Service-provided email account? Or are such accounts considered an enabling piece for those which don't otherwise have an IMAP account they'd prefer to use? Part of my goal is to clarify our email integration story. Additionally, progressing towards resolution on what email account features the Hosted Service should plan for in the Beta time will be helpful the roadmap work there. -- Jared _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
