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

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)