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)
