[Masonmail-developers] Update to the CVS repository

[Tom A. <tal...@ta...>]

I apologize for not having a well thought out email, but this is 
something that is long overdue and probably somewhat obvious to everyone 
here.

As some of you may be aware, we haven't really done much lately.

If you want the executive summary:  CVS repository is repopulated.

Much of this is my fault.

I was enticed by the possibility that someone else in the group has 
already done much of this work and was volunteering to present much of 
his completed work to the project.  What can I say, I'm lazy?

That was about 3 months ago.

To steal a phrase from a friend of mine:
"life keeps getting in the way."

Not a fault, sometimes it's nice to have a life, even if that means a 
busy job.  It could be worse.  I look forward to his participation as he 
has already demonstrated some excellent qualities, capabilities, and 
knowledge of the subject.  Unfortunately I do not pay him as much as his 
day job does....

In the meantime I have been working, or reworking, the project that I 
had started at home on my own to play with some ideas of my own.  At 
this point in time I think it is in the best interest of the group that 
I make this code available in whatever state it is in for everyone to 
have something tangible.  After all, we are here to write an application...

Sorry if I sound self-centered in all this, but I've been working on 
this alone for a while and really don't want to anymore.  It's fun and 
all, but not fair and not as productive as it could/should be.

If I were to wait until my code was presentable I would be too old to 
remember why I started this thing.  So bear with me.

Since this was my code that I was writing for myself, I've taken many 
liberties in the approach to reflect my personal philosophy towards a 
mail web client.  Some of this is inconsistent with the original 
postings on this mailing list, but hopefully they aren't insurmountable.

I'm am striving for a few core goals:

Simplicity -- Simple to use, Simple to install, Braindead simple to 
manage/maintain.  Very little to configure, even less to maintain.

Fast -- lean and mean.  I've had to drop some wonderful cpan modules 
because they were easy to program with, but slow.  I've spent a lot of 
time working on speed.

Lean -- This is a lightweight interface between two protocols: IMAP and 
HTTP.  As such, there isn't much need for file space or extraneous chaff 
on the web server.

These last two, in addition to maintainability have resulted in the 
following approaches.
I have dropped Sessions in Mason for File Cache session management. 
Fast, light, no overhead in management, and they self-expire/cleanup.

There have been posts about customization and language support.  At this 
time I've completely abandoned all such efforts and will rely on any 
customization to be a part of the CSS pages.  As far as language 
support, we'll see.  I've never tried anything like that and haven't 
figured out how other applications do it.

I don't want a lot of graphics if I can avoid it since they just slow 
down the pipeline.  CSS can do a lot if I could remember all of it.  But 
some graphics are unavoidable.

As an expirement, I'm trying to put together a three panel FRAME 
homepage for the webmail.  This is consistent with what the desktop GUI 
applications (Thunderbird) look like and might prove to be more self 
explanatory to a new user accustomed to only these tools.  The value of 
this remains to be seen.

I do know that it's a little slow in pulling in 5000 emails into a 
directory page -- large and ~30seconds.  But this is much better than 
PHP applications I've tried and almost Thunderbird speeds.  I consider 
this to be worth a few points.

But I can read email.  Not much else, but it's got some functionality.

This results in three basic framesets on the main page: folders, 
directory, and messages.
Folders is a list of the folders.
Directory is the display of the current content
messages is initially blank but with message appearing here.

In both folders and directories, there is a list of features that I made 
a note of adding to these sections.  These are sort of my notes in html 
form on the pages.

I hope that this would present a conceptual outline of what I had in 
mind when I started out on this.

As I said in the beginning, this was the code that I developed on my 
machine for my use as my project.  It's also not very HTML::Mason looking.

That's not the case anymore, it's our project on our CVS repository for 
out development.  But I believe it is important for everyone to at least 
understand the origins even if they don't appear to be the direction we 
want to go in.

Now, if it sits for another three months without another post on this 
mailing list I'll probably go back to my cave and write my little code 
and wonder what things might have been like...  But I really do invite 
you to check out the CVS code and lets start talking about whats there 
and what it might look like.

It might make sense to put up some kind of web server for someone to see 
what it might actually look like, but I'm not sure where/how that will 
come about.  Right now I'm not certain of it's overall security though 
I've spend a lot of time on that aspect.

Thanks to all who made it this far.