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

[Alec Flett]

Morgen Sagen wrote:
>
> 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.

I'll admit that I thought the original IMAP server proposal sounded a 
little crazy at first. But at the same time I have long been touting how 
much work it is to make a full-blown UI for an e-mail client.

I'm now pretty convinced that making an IMAP server (especially given 
the Twisted implementation) is probably quite a bit less work than 
writing a whole e-mail client. I think it could make a great short term 
solution, plus provide a way to quickly mock up use cases of the sidebar 
within an existing e-mail client like Thunderbird.

For example, it would allow us to get the feel of what a real "virtual 
folder" is, show what a sidebar filled with tags looks like, and so 
fort. It would also make it easy to experiment with some kind of 
hierarchical tag list, or some other specialized hierarchy like Opera 
Mail has.

+1 :)

Alec