Mozilla Mail backend and Chandler

Ducky did a good survey of the various e-mail technologies out in the world. Here's a document of some next steps in the investigations.

Preliminary Investigation Goals

Requirements

• we need something which speaks to smtp servers for outgoing mail
• we need something which can parse mail messages
• we need something which can speak to pop servers
• we need something which can speak to imap servers
• these don't have to come from the same place
• there does need to be some way to get to a python api
• we need an abstraction for e-mail messages that live in our data store, and a way to get data from other sources of e-mail into our store, and some way of interoperating with imap when the local store is not authoratative.

Things we need to know.

• is the list of candidates complete
• what are the leading candidates
• what is the cost/benefit for each of the leading candidates

and for cost/benefit, we would like to be able to drill all the way down to the barest technical details, like, how well it works in a threaded environment, how it performs under large loads, how hard it is to pick and choose (remember we have our own message storage and indexing) functionality.

based on my 10,000 ft. view, it is at least worth a run at using the guts of mozilla as the solution for these things, but we should have a non-anecdotal reason for rejecting other candidates like twisted and c-client.

Proposed deliverables

1. technical evaluation of the various open source choices and a solid, technical based recommendation for what we should choose.
2. initial effort to integrate the choice, whatever it is, get it into our build system, wrapped in a python api and loaded into chandler
3. become familiar with what data looks like in chandler, what does "schema" mean for us
4. design a schema for e-mail data
5. a pop importer for e-mail data
6. get familiar with execution environment of chandler
7. make a proposal for how imap would integrate
8. write a the imap<->chandler data bridge

Projects

• Technical evaluation of mozilla backend. This is underway, check out the MozillaMailStatus20030923 page for more details.

-- MichaelToy - 22 Sep 2003