Here are some open questions and thoughts about IMAP and edbrowse. Should we completely replace POP with IMAP, or should we try to support both protocols? If we try to support both, I think we'll end up having two separate user interfaces for mail: the one we have now, and a new one for reading and manipulating mail stored on the IMAP server. So I kind of like the idea of ripping out the support for POP3 entirely, and starting from scratch. My personal workflow is to keep all my mail on my IMAP server, so maybe that affects my judgement.
What should the user interface to IMAP look like? Here's my proposal. When you fire up the mail reader, edbrowse connects to the IMAP server and fetches a list of folders with unread mail. With IMAP, "inbox" is a special folder name. It's where most mail goes by default. We'll guarantee that if inbox has any unread messages, it goes to the top of the list, since most people will probably want to read it first. The list will be enumerated, and message counts will be displayed alongside folder names. After the list is displayed, edbrowse displays a command prompt. Sample screen: 1. inbox 10/24 2. edbrowse-dev 3/10 3. family 4/7 ? We see that inbox has 10 unread messages out of 24, edbrowse-dev has 3 unread messages out of 10, and so forth. If you hit enter here, with no command, you select the first folder with unread messages. If you want to go to a specific folder, you can do that with the g command. g will take a folder name as its argument. E.G., g edbrowse-dev to go directly to edbrowse-dev. Tab completion would also be nice here: g ed<tab> The main screen will offer a handful of other commands: p (poll server for new messages) c (create folder) d (delete folder) a (redisplay list, showing *all* folders, including those with 0 unread messages) After selecting a folder, edbrowse will display the first unread message in that folder, the same way it would display a message today. IMAP gives us a few extra options for dealing with that message, such as copying it or moving it to a different folder. Those will just be additional commands available from the command prompt. Inside the folder, we can make mail reading look pretty much the same way it does today. Once you've finished with the unread messages in the folder, you're thrown back to the flist of folders described above. Thoughts? Does all of this seem reasonable so far? -- Chris _______________________________________________ Edbrowse-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.the-brannons.com/mailman/listinfo/edbrowse-dev
