Email

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Revision as of 19:18, 14 July 2006 by Imr (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

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)