Minimum Email Feature Set

Under construction!!

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<Official OSAF Thinking>

This area is for listing the absolute bare minimum email features in Chandler. As a starting point, anything that is in any two of Eudora, Mozilla, and Apple's Mail.app should probably be in our minimum feature set.

Organizing messages

• List messages in some sort of summary view UI needs firming up
• Detail view of message
• buttons and keyboard shortcuts for
  • next message
  • previous message
  • reply
  • reply-to-all
  • forward
  • done
  • Compose (new message)
  • Get Messages
• Group messages ("folder" equivalent; both local and remote) needs discussion

Retrieving Messages

• IMAP support, including namespaces, authentication, and SSL
  • manual and scheduled download
  • expunge on delete
  • cache local copies
• IMAP weirdness eliminate need discussion of what the strangeness is and where it comes from
• POP support, including authentication and SSL
  • manual and scheduled-time-interval download
  • leave messages on server
• background downloading of messages
• integrated spam filter to be discussed: agents? API? straight spambayes, straight SpamAssassin^?, modified?
• block downloading of external images (T'bird and Eudora)

Sending/replying to messages

• SMTP support
  • authentication
    • get-before-send (in other words, if you try to send before downloading, the client should ask for your password and download instead of showing a "connection refused" error)
    • SMTP-AUTH authentication built-in to SMTP
  • security via SSL
  • send immediately upon completion
  • NOT DONE: delay sending by a specified time to allow sender to change mind
• support to, cc and bcc
• support new, reply, forward, redirect and resend
• Address messages with address book or raw email address
• Auto-complete recipients based on name in address book (primary email address only)
• Add sender to address book easily
• save incomplete messages somewhere ("Drafts")
• quote messages in at least one style (e.g. ">"), with attribution line
• spell-check (batch is okay for minimal set, though inline is much better for users)
• optional rewrap of long outgoing message lines
• support encoding and sending of attachments

Reading messages

• view raw text
• user-selectable default display fonts
• rewrapping of long incoming message lines
• handle attachments
  • handle text, HTML, and images in-line
  • save-to-disk/choose helper app for ones that can't be displayed inline

General

• change Chandler message attributes (e.g. Project, Category, StartTime^?)
• Multiple account support
• support for working offline (store copy of messages locally; send when connected)
• easy creation of a Task from a message
• import/export from/to mbox format

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• Filters how filters will be done needs long discussion
  • conditions: To, From, CC, Recipient, Subject, body, Account
    • is, contains
  • actions: delete, set attribute (read flag, done flag, color, project, etc.), auto-respond, forward, set notification (e.g. play sound)
• Search (by same conditions as in Filters) needs searc support

Dependencies:

• UI to support good index view
• Doc. arch for all views and button layout
• Repository
  • for storing messages
  • queries on email views
  • search
• Networking framework for IMAP/POP/SMTP support
• Email libraries
• HTML presentation and composition libraries
• Contacts parcel for addresses
• Agent/Notification framework for
  • periodic background mail retrieval
  • Filters

Tasks which have no or minimal UI but need doing "under the hood"

• support for displaying quoted-printable text (pre-HTML way of encoding extended ASCII)
• MIME support, including base64 encoding, multipart messages, etc.
  • EXCEPT: multipart/external because of security concerns
• support for displaying and sending format=flowed (way of expressing that lines could be wrapped) (Moz and Eudora)
• support for displaying several different character encodings (e.g. ISO-8859-1, US-ASCII, Windows-1252)
• support for displaying HTML
• suppress almost all headers
  • NOT IN MINIMAL SET: user ability to select which headers to suppress

<End Official OSAF Thinking>

-- DuckySherwood - 23 Sep 2003

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Pavlov notes that HTML message composition is a huge amount of work and perhaps not strictly necessary. While it is true that plenty of people used email before HTML, all the consumer-grade email programs have this, and it is a popular, heavily-used feature. However, after reading the FeaturePrioritizationMeeting20030827, I moved to debatable features because it is so much work.

Pavlov questioned the importance of SSL. I believe that in order to get power users to even test and play with it, we have to have SSL. We also need to support authentication, as their ISPs might require it. Fortunately, there are existing libraries that should make this support relatively easy.

-- DuckySherwood - 24 Sep 2003

Changes made:

• Organized features into categories
• separated out filters and search from rest of features. These are major topics I suggest not convering for Monday's meeting
• a few @@@s with questions

-- ChaoLam - 3 Oct 2003