[Design] Re: Setting up special stamping IMAP Folders

[Brian Kirsch]

Mimi did an excellent job summarizing our current thinking. I just 
wanted to add a few extra points.

See comments in line.


Mimi Yin wrote:
> Sorry, I was an idiot and had no subject line. Sending again.
>
> We are continuing to figure out our email plan. Here was the last, 
> most complete summary (from Sheila) of the various 'Email - Bridging 
> the Gap' options we have available to us: 
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-August/005225.html
>
> The two candidates at the top of our list is subscribing to IMAP 
> folders and implementing special Chandler headers so that Chandler 
> clients can communicate with each other directly, without forcing 
> users to pull down all the email in their Inbox.
>
> Brian Kirsch has proposed a stop-gap measure for IMAP folders, which 
> is perhaps even better than allowing users to pull down arbitrary IMAP 
> folders.
>
> When users fill out IMAP account information, we provide them with an 
> option to set up special "Chandler IMAP folders" that allow them to 
> not only add messages from their email clients into Chandler, but also 
> to specify whether they want the message to be added to the Task list 
> or Calendar. (All messages are automatically added to Mail.) (The 
> option should probably be checked by default, with a [Configure] 
> button that allows the user to choose which of the 3 folders they want.)

There is an additional option for POP users as well which is to leverage 
the Chandler IMAP server parcel that Travis worked on. In a POP context 
there are no server side folders and thus no easy way to 
intercommunicate between Chandler and the mail client. In this case 
having an IMAP account that points to Chandler is key. The Chandler IMAP 
server parcel would expose three folders Chandler Mail, Chandler Tasks, 
and Chandler Calendar. Whether a person is working in a POP or IMAP 
environment the user experience is the same. However, when using POP 
there is a limitation currently that Chandler hosting the IMAP server 
parcel must be running.

In addition, it would be great to have some scripts that could 
pre-configure the IMAP server parcel account information in the most 
used mail clients such as Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Outlook / Outlook 
Express. This way the complicated aspects of setting up an IMAP account 
can be abstracted from the user.


Eventually, we could also add support for web mail applications such as 
Gmail and Yahoo Mail  using the same folder / labeling strategy. For 
example, Chandler could pre-create three folders in a users Yahoo mail 
account Chandler Mail, Chandler Tasks, Chandler Calendar. Placing a 
message in one of these folders has the same results and behaviors as 
working with an IMAP client.

Thus, we have a unified experience across a variety of clients and 
protocols.


>
> The 3 folders would be:
> + Chandler Mail: Messages in this folder are added to the Mail Dashboard
> + Chandler Tasks: Messages in this folder are added to the Task Dashboard
> + Chander Calendar: Messages in this folder are added to the Calendar 
> Dashboard
>
The natural language / date parsing tools that Bear and Darshana worked 
on would be used to determine context when messages are placed in the 
Chandler Calendar folder.


> This of course, doesn't allow users to add the same message to both 
> the Task list or Calendar. But it's a huge improvement to not being 
> able to specify a context at all.

Actually that is not true. Each mail message has a unique message id. If 
a user copied a message to both the Chandler Calendar and Chandler Tasks 
it is conceivable that our mail service could be smart enough to 
determine that the user wanted the message to be both a task and a event.

However, this is advanced logic that would take some development work.  
I would propose holding off on this and consider it an enhancement in a 
future version of Chandler.
>
> For mock-ups, see: 
> http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/UnifiedDataInAndOutProposal#CommentsSection 
>
>
> Brian also raised the excellent question of: will our target users 
> have IMAP accounts? How widely deployed is IMAP amongst small 
> workgroups with scarce IT resources?

Yes, I am concerned that our target users may not be leveraging IMAP.

However, with the foldering strategy proposed I think we can also 
provide a decent experience for POP and eventually Web Mail users.


-Brian
>
> Thx,
>
> Mimi
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-- 
Brian Kirsch 
Internationalization Architect / Mail Service Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation
543 Howard Street 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
http://www.osafoundation.org