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