Email

Offering Email through the Laptops

OLPC intern Imran Akbar is working on a prototype email client written in Python. It will initially utilize existing POP/IMAP servers to store messages, and use a keyserver for GPG encryption and zlib compression built-in. The GUI interface will be simpler, with three tabs on the left: Mail, Contacts, and maybe History. Voicemail capabilities will be added later utilizing the Speex codec (recording and playing back of voice messages).

Other ideas:

• captchas and hashcash to eliminate spam
• casy mailing-list creation
• tags
• presence - location & local time, through a P2P layer such as the Circle
• global address book
• ditching the Re: and Fw: conventions, and moving them to the headers instead, along with hashes for each conversation so they can be properly threaded

Considering a four-step spam solution: for in-network email:

• captchas required to send any msg
• hashcashs added to email headers
• a user-based dynamic ranking system

for regular email:

• integrating pyzor (collaborative spam filtering) and spambayes (bayesian spam filtering)

Bits and Pieces:

• pymailgui
• pyne
• pyaudio
• Either pyQt or PyGTK as the GUI toolkit - perhaps pyQt due to cross-platform compatibility, with a frozen binary for systems without Qt.

Tentative timeline:

• End of July: a running python email client with a GUI
• End of August: above, with encryption/compression/backend database support
• End of September: above, with P2P support and voicemail capabilities

More thoughts on why email still sucks: http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2006/07/how-researchers-are-reinventing-mail.html

Generous thanks to Wingware for their great IDE for Python.

Imran is looking for a nice name for the project, preferably a recursive name a-la GNU.

--Imr 14:54, 14 July 2006 (EDT)

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