[Catmail] Catmail project

[Jose Luis Martinez]

Hello,

	Welcome to the catmail project list. I hope this becomes an open forum 
for discussion and design of the ¿first? open webmail project based on 
the splendid Catalyst MVC Framework.

Different people expect very different things from a webmail. So one of 
the goals is to "make it pluggable", so people can extend the project at 
their will.

I think the basic components for the moment would be:
  - Access to Mailboxes (pretty common in webmails XD)
  - Email Composition (common too)
  - Address Book
  - Configuration (signatures, user identity). Basically a configuration 
store for the webmail itself and future plugins.

My impression is that other webmail projects code has grown quite 
organically, and many of them have been around from before the AJAX 
boom, so they are based on "hand made" HTML, or haven't had time (or the 
possibility) to adapt to the "new" web tecnologies. There seems to be 
quite an amount of new webmails using AJAX tecnologies that are emerging 
rapidly (Haven't read much code, though), and seem to be growing well too.

I think the Catalyst part of catmail should be oriented to offering 
generic "webmail" services (that is: list messages in mailbox, search 
messages, search address book, configuration store, etc) to different 
possible frontends in the most independant form possible (XML, JSON, 
etc), so the frontend can be written in the framework that we most want 
(dojo, rico, extjs, YUI, etc).

So the first task would be to make a Catalyst model using one of CPANs' 
modules. any suggestions?
Then select an existing view / base controller that would make getting 
data to the clients easy in different formats (if possible). suggestions 
on this one?

CPAN has already lots of modules to do lots of the tasks required for 
the job, so the motto should be "We have the building blocks, let's glue 
them together".

Jose Luis Martinez
jlmartinez at capside.com