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Otter Browser Forum / Otter-Mail
as I am one of those guys who really, really like to have an email client in otter-browser, I may start a new thread discussing how the development can/may be done.
Please comment: Do you think that this is a good idea or not? Or how would you guys do that?
This is how I would do it:
I would split the email module into 3 parts:
1. The email sender module (the smtp module)
2. The email fetcher module (inculding a pop3 and an imap module)
3. The email indexer module (the module that is used to search/tag etc. and read the emails)
The separation into these three parts would make it possible to:
- develop the parts without many conflicts and by different developers.
- use existing mail storages by the indexer and test/use it (the mail-reader) even if (e.g.) no pop3 or imap module exists yet.
- more "easily" built an importer for (e.g.) the Opera m2 mail client storage and use the mail module while still using Opera Mail (or some other Email client) in the background.
1. The smtp module is probably the easiest part I think. There are probably several libs out there that may do the work of encoding for email, attachments etc., though I didn't use anyone of them.
Also: Nothing in here may break existing email storages so if a user wants to combine otter-mail with an other email client this should be fine (except for emails in the "sent" folder, which may not occur in the other mail client).
2. The pop3/imap module may be a bit more trickier as this cannot easily be combined with another (existing) mail client as both may then write to the same email storage and the indexing-process will not be syncronized.
3. There are already email indexer out there. I am currently testing "notmuch mail":
https://notmuchmail.org/
which seems to work quite well for this suppose!! I even could easily read the opera mail storage, index it and search it without many configurations (except for the folder, of course)! And: It seems to be really fast, and everything is based on tags (or "labels"), which is exactly what opera mail was built on! So mails are not saved in folders but are tagged with read/unread/inbox/darfts/attachments etc.
You could then let opera mail (or another email client) fetch your mail and search/read it through a new mail client (otter-mail in this case).
Tags/Labels (meaning the name of the tag/label) could probably be imported from Opera Mail, while the references to the mails probably couldn't, as this seems to be closed software (please correct me if you know how to read/parse an existing opera indexer-binary file).
What do you think about this? What are your ideas about how the email client could be developed? What are the minimal features one may have (or users may want to have) for a first user-test-realease?
I will probably keep on searching/testing some solutions that may help building the email client and maybe (if I find some time) build a prototype of such an email-client....
Any ideas about the email client subject would be appreciated!
Thanks!