[Design] Chandler as an email client? Another idea...

[Morgen Sagen]

On Jan 14, 2006, at 3:57 PM, John Anderson wrote:

> While I think Morgen's idea is intriguing, I don't think that he's  
> a very typical customer -- or if he is, Chandler's user base will  
> be almost zero. Most prospective customers don't need all the  
> features he does and would be quite happy with something that is an  
> improvement over Outlook Express or Thunderbird. To be better,  
> Chandler doesn't have to have all the same features of those  
> products, it just needs to do a better job of what most people need  
> most of the time.
>
> John

Actually, when it comes to email feature requirements, I don't think  
I'm out of the ordinary at all.  There are some basic features that I  
think just about anyone needs:  HTML mail rendering, threaded- 
conversation support, spam filtering, etc.  If we're to ship  
"something that is an improvement over Outlook Express or  
Thunderbird" you have to ask yourself how many person-hours went into  
developing those apps?  In less than an hour I downloaded and tweaked  
a Twisted-IMAP-server implementation and converted it to a Chandler  
parcel.  The next step will be to have it store emails as Chandler  
items as opposed to Maildir storage.

Perhaps I should have rephrased my proposal as "a way to increase  
Chandler adoption *until* we're a full blown email client."  :-)   
There's no reason we can't take both approaches, especially if  
embedding an IMAP server is as simple as I suspect it is.

~morgen