My current line of thinking is that email should be a lot more like a wiki, which is very much in line with the [intertwingle] idea. While I see a wiki as a knowledge repository, much like a more dynamic HyperCard, or just how the web should have been built in the first place, many people see a wiki as the sum of it's markup language. I've decided that standard plaintext email conventions are really just another kind of markup, just a different convention, though in some places you still need to have a level of automation. To test this theory, I've done some work on a IMAP to Wiki gateway, that pulls mail from IMAP and inserts it as "snips" into a SnipSnap server, just for experimentation purposes. On another note, I did get threading almost working. My remaining problem is a bug/feature in JavaMail's MimeMessage class - I need to be able to create empty MimeMessages, and unfortunately you can't do that. [MIME4J] looks like it could solve a problem I was putting off tackling, though I haven't gotten the thing to build properly yet. It remains to be seen how robust it is - email parsing of any kind breaks very easily, as every email client out there seems to interpret the MIME RFC differently. So far it looks as though [James' Mailet API] is the way to go for a standardized filtering API, though adapting it for an email client rather than server might end up being a lot of work. So far I haven't found anyone but the Apache Foundation using the Mailet API, which isn't encouraging. I also haven't found many 3rd party mailets.
Which sounds like accomplishing a lot, but isn't. [ 3/07/2005 11:46:00 PM ] [ ]
