I will be trying to enhance the ISP support in Mailnews and Mozilla in
general. ISPs should be able to configure Mozilla (mail/news-accounts,
proxies, startpage, etc.) using some consistent and simple steps,
without requiring any user intervention and ideally without overwriting
any existing configuration.
Subject:
* Mail-accounts
* News-accounts
* Proxies
* Startpage
* Publisher (once the upload feature is implemented in Composer)
* Throbber?
* Skin?
Horizontal Requirements:
* No user intervention at all
Optionally, all necessary information is provided by the ISP,
incl. name of the user etc.. Optionally, Mozilla must then not pop
up any comfirmation dialog or something like that. All user
communication is done by the ISP's apps.
* Simple interface to ISP
All infomation the ISP provides must be transferred via a simple
and consistent way. Having 2 different data formats (e.g. RDF-XML
for Mail-accounts and prefs.js for proxies) is not acceptable.
Ideally, we would extend the RDF-XML ISP files, that Mailnews
uses, to keep all of the required info.
* Concurrent ISPs
Ideally, configuring Mozilla for an ISP would not overwrite
existing configuration, especially proxies. One profile per ISP is
not really user-friendly, so I am assuming that the ISP must
coexist within the same profile.
E.g. there could be several proxy configurations at the same time,
between which the user can switch using the offline button. (Of
course, the new config would have to be activated initally,
optionally. So, a minimal amount of overwriting is unavoidable.)
However, I won't implement the "multiple proxy configs per
profile" feature, at least not in the first stage. I.e. we should
discuss the data format, but don't need to discuss the UI yet.
Problems:
* Dataflow
(important)
Where and how should I hook up the ISP config file reading and
configuration of the user profile?
* Dataformat Mail-accounts
Mailnews does a good job with giving the user a template for new
accounts, so he can add more email accounts from a certain ISP
without having to bother with technical settings like server names.
What if an ISP wants to automatically configure the main account,
while still giving the user the option to add more? (Typical
situation for an ISP which offers multiple mail accounts per
customer.) How do we encode this situation in the data the ISP
provides (i.e. the ISP RDF file, assuming we use that)?
* Throbber
(less important)
ISPs get mad by the thought of adding their logo as throbber.
Should we still offer this option (as 4.x did, and I think MSIE
does)? Or should we let them change the whole skin, if they want
to change the throbber?
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