Hi, Morgen
An interesting idea ... some random comments are inline below.
--Grant
On Jan 13, 2006, at 15:52, Morgen Sagen wrote:
I was thinking about where on the scale from "none-at-all" to "full-
blown" Chandler should be when it comes to our email
implementation. It would take one heck of a Chandler email client
to make me stop using the application I use now. If we have an
incomplete implementation that tries to be an email client, then
I'll probably end up dealing with email in two places (in Chandler
and in my other email app) which I'm not sure is optimal. If we
want to instead embrace existing clients and figure out how
Chandler can interoperate with them, one possibility would be to
embed an IMAP server inside Chandler. People could then stick with
their favorite email client, connected to their usual IMAP server
and *also* connect to the Chandler IMAP server running on their
local machine.
There are security issues here, of course. Hopefully, we could use
some trick a la Google desktop to make sure we're not opening up all
your Chandler info to the outside world. (We could make the user
create an IMAP password, too, I guess, though that seems weird).
What does this enable:
1) A way to get items into Chandler: We could use IMAP folders
being served from Chandler itself as a mechanism to create Chandler
items. Say an email comes in and I want to make a task out of it
-- just drag the message into a Tasks folder in the Chandler
account (all within my email app's UI) and Chandler automatically
generates a Task Item in the repository containing the body of that
email. Attachments would be extracted an converted to items, etc.
2) A way to get items from Chandler to email client: Items within
Chandler could appear as emails within the Chandler IMAP folders.
They could then also be forwarded to other people just like any
other email message, using your mail client. The Chandler IMAP
folders could be 'virtual', meaning you could create a folder named
OSAF, and all Chandler items which have the OSAF tag would
automatically appear there. Or there could be folders per
collection, etc.
This will require serializing arbitrary objects from the domain model
as mail messages (i.e. RFC (2)822 format). Naturally, things like
events and tasks could be represented as .ics attachments. For things
like stamped items, you could probably do some multipart/alternative
MIME representation that would allow Chandler to display the items in
all their glory, while other clients would show some subset of the
information.
Hopefully, we would not end up descending too deeply into the abyss
of MIME interoperability :). One way to do this is to restrict the
set of clients we would support and test against.
It's also worth remembering that messages in IMAP are immutable
(apart from flags), so you have to make sure that changed items in
Chandler show up as new messages (new IMAP UID, and new Message-ID
header, probably, too). Also, if an item appears in multiple
collections (e.g. "Tasks", things with tag "Grumpy the Dwarf"), then
after editing in Chandler, presumably all its target mailboxes have
to update their copies, too.
3) A way to generate/send email messages from Chandler: I believe
it would be easy to have Chandler trigger a mail client to open up
a message-authoring window, complete with To: and Subject: (and
maybe the body too?) pre-populated, ready for the user to edit/send.
Were you thinking of doing this by asking the OS to open a mailto:
URL? That would allow you to set headers and a plain-text body.
Anything more complex would probably run into client bugs :).
Or an alternative would be for Chandler to directly create an email
message in the local Chandler Drafts folder, ready for the user to
edit/send.
Chandler would also continue to have (internal) IMAP/POP/SMTP
client support:
4) Simple emails such as sharing invitations don't really require a
full blown email client UI, and thus could be sent using something
akin to the current detail view, not using an external client.
True.
5) Chandler could monitor the user's real IMAP/POP inbox, watching
for special emails that are Chandler specific (like sharing
invitations) and processing them.
My understanding is that Twisted has server-side IMAP support
already, so we wouldn't be starting from scratch. This is
something I might tinker with...
~morgen
P.S. There are other scenarios like having Chandler actually be an
IMAP proxy between your email client and your IMAP server...
another possiblity.
I have heard IMAP server implementors say that IMAP proxies are hard
to implement. Whether this is true in our specialized case is an
interesting question.
--Grant
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