Email

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Revision as of 06:52, 14 February 2007 by Jacobolus (talk | contribs)
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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)