OK, Rephrasing the Questions - Something New

[Simon Bowring]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 22:35:44 +0000, John Drabik wrote:

>	This CAN'T be that hard!  Any ideas?  Anybody want to give it
>a try?  

You'd really have to use one of the existing open source email 
clients as a basis (why reinvent the wheel and then spend months
debugging it?). Writing even a text mode standards compliant 
email program *from scratch* would be pretty hard and very time 
consuming, a GUI one is much harder again. Just understanding 
the 15-20 or more(?) relevent RFCs is a daunting task on its own.

Steve's probably got some ideas about what the best open source
clients are (Steve?).

Regards portablility - GUI programs are notoriously non-portable,
when portable libraries are usage, they're often hard to "control" 
(hard to make them do what you want, rather than what "they think"
you want).

You could target X (which is messy and tricky to program), but this
largely limits you to Unix (I know OS/2, VMS etc have X too).

The best portable GUI library is without doubt Java's world class
Swing library, which has *no peers* as regards portability, 
"controllability", elegance of design and implementation, "power", 
and cost (it also has pretty good run-time performance), but you 
pay the very heavy memory resource usage and slow load time penalties 
that Java introduces.

>Can you even point me to a "Basics of all E-mail Clients" web
>site that explains how to get started?
If you find one, please let me know (but I think you'll be lucky!).

What I would like to see is a set of open source core modules that
implement the raw "mail" handling in a modular and extensible way, 
such that the UI could be completely separated from the core 
functions, and several differenmt UIs could be developed to suit 
differing tastes and approaches. Most (email) programs are made or 
broken on the UI (assuming they have reasonably capable and reasonably 
standards compliant internals).

Simon