Hi Morgen:
I agree with you that making Chandler an IMAP server is a good idea if
it's as easy as you think.
However, I don't think that just because Outlook Express or Thunderbird
were a huge amount of work we should conclude that we can't make a
useful email client without duplicating their work. Consider situations
where a different way of approaching familiar problems lead to new kinds
of applications. For example, Lightroom or Aperture versus Photoshop. Or
Quicken versus the spreadsheet. Or mouse based editing versus vi. Or the
iApps. I wouldn't be surprised that there is a simple but different
approach to email that could result in a similar paradigm shift -- and I
think that's how we can have the biggest impact.
John
Morgen Sagen wrote:
On Jan 14, 2006, at 3:57 PM, John Anderson wrote:
While I think Morgen's idea is intriguing, I don't think that he's a
very typical customer -- or if he is, Chandler's user base will be
almost zero. Most prospective customers don't need all the features
he does and would be quite happy with something that is an
improvement over Outlook Express or Thunderbird. To be better,
Chandler doesn't have to have all the same features of those
products, it just needs to do a better job of what most people need
most of the time.
John
Actually, when it comes to email feature requirements, I don't think
I'm out of the ordinary at all. There are some basic features that I
think just about anyone needs: HTML mail rendering,
threaded-conversation support, spam filtering, etc. If we're to ship
"something that is an improvement over Outlook Express or Thunderbird"
you have to ask yourself how many person-hours went into developing
those apps? In less than an hour I downloaded and tweaked a
Twisted-IMAP-server implementation and converted it to a Chandler
parcel. The next step will be to have it store emails as Chandler
items as opposed to Maildir storage.
Perhaps I should have rephrased my proposal as "a way to increase
Chandler adoption *until* we're a full blown email client." :-)
There's no reason we can't take both approaches, especially if
embedding an IMAP server is as simple as I suspect it is.
~morgen
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