Hi, Last night I had taughts about email management and I thought you might be interested.
So, for me there should be three different (and potentially more) programs that would manage e-mails: - an email retriever - an email reader - an email writer And I think the basic object in the filesystem representing an email should be a mailbox. Not a single email. Why ? Because if you use one file per email, you have problems: - how to name the file ? With the subject. So you'll have problem with replies that all have the same subject - also, I like the threaded view of emails where replies appear below the message they reply to. I don't think file managers can provide that. So a mailbox can contain a complete thread, or maybe all messages from a mailing list ... you choose. And when a single email can be relevant in itself, there is no problem having a mailbox that olly contain a single email. So first, the email fetcher. It would be an application that would only work in background, hidden in the dock or the system tray, that would just periodically ask POP servers, IMAP, RSS feeds ... for new mails, filter them, and put them in a mailbox defined by the configuration (or the filters obviously). Others applications would be able to ask the email fetcher whenever there is any new e-mail and in which mailbox they are (maybe dBus ?) Then, the email viewer. This application will display the content of a mailbox, and the mails contained it it. If the mailbox only contains a single email, it would display it directly (the common headers, then the body). If there are more mails in the mailbox, there will be a panel at the top listing all emails contained in the mailbox in a threaded configurable view. If no mailbox is opened, the email viewer will show a window with a left sided panel (configurable if one wants) that would show recently opened mailboxes, and the favourites mailboxes (user bookmarks). When selected, the mailbox would be displayed on the right side. All selections should be memorized between invocations of the mail viewer. if I open a mailbox i opened yesterday, the message displayed should be the yesterday's message. The same for mailboxes. Now, when a mailbox is opened, there should be buttons that would start the e-mail writer program. Buttons such as New mail, reply, transfer ... The mail editor program basicly is a program that would let the user write an email and save it in a mailbox or send it through SMTP, Jabber, sendmail ... If invoked by the mail viewer, the mailbox opened should be passed as parameter to the mail editor so it would be able to save it in this mailbox directly instead of having to ask the question to the user. Of course all these applications should share a common addressbook. Preferably in a standard way (so I can choose the addressbook I want). Well, I think a such system for reading emails would be wonderful ... what do you think of it ? I might start soon to write applications such as the email reader (if I find time) ... but I might as well not (I think about it for a very long time). The only problem is what language/toolkit I'll use. will it be Python/Gtk, Lisaac/Gtk, Lisaac/GNUstep, Objc/GNUstep, ... Thanks for reading. Mildred -- Mildred Ki'lya E-Mail: mildred593(at)online.fr Site: <http://mildred632.free.fr/> XMPP: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (GoogleTalk, Jabber) GPG: 197C A7E6 645B 4299 6D37 684B 6F9D A8D6 [9A7D 2E2B] _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
