Subject: Re: Ideas for PINE GUI and libraries (q)

From: Andrew Sweger <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 13:36:56 -0800 (PST)

On Wed, 29 Mar 1995, Philip Nelson wrote:

> What do you use for the Mac?  I've been toying with the idea of trying to
> port the Windows version to the Mac (blindly because I've never tried to
> port something before!).  We are using Eudora now but I like the IMAP
> features for people who move around on and off campus.

We presently (about a hundred Macs) use MS Mail clients on the Macs with a
MS Mail server running on a Mac. Microsoft dropped the ball and we haven't
found anyone willing to pick it up (for less than a large sum of money).
We will move to Pine via telnet and just suffer without the local file
access for a while. We may work out a way for users to access their home
directory on the Unix server via NFS to the Mac desktop which will help a
little. So far, we haven't seen a Mac IMAP/MIME client fully realized.
Mail Drop from Baylor is a start but feels like alpha code to me. 

If Pine were ported to the Mac, I don't think it would really be Pine
necessarily because the interface could be completely different. There's
no need for a menu structure matching Pine's. The way I would envision
things would be a Chooser system extension for accessing IMAP services. 
Within the Chooser, one selects an IMAP and SMTP server, username/id, and
password. I think the IMAP4 spec would come into play very well for this
(send via IMAP and folder collection information? can't remember). When
connected, you would see something similar to an HFS storage device on the
desktop. Inside would be folder collections. Here's the catch. Now you add
a system extension (to System 7.5+) that adds a file type of Electronic
Mail to the system (type='MIME' perhaps) and handles MIME interpretation.
This would allow email messages (documents) to appear as Electronic Mail
under the Kind column of listings. Now you can drag email messages from
your IMAP storage window (which looks just like any normal Finder window)
to a disk to store messages there. To create or send email, the New
command (in the IMAP storage window) creates a new empty email message.
When creating or viewing messages, a Mail menu would be appended to the
menu bar containing options to Send, Forward, Reply, etc. or some such
features. Documents of type Electronic Mail could contain all the MIME
types and would be presented and handled in an appropriate Finder-like
fashion. 

Roll all this into OpenDoc, Drag-and-Drop, threaded news reader, Web
browser, and toaster, then you're talking a pretty cool package. 

Of course, this could be done on a System 6 machine using an 
Application/Extension as well. But then, everyone's using System 7.5 
anyway, right?

-- 
  /  Andrew B. Sweger                      [email-masked]
 //  Computer Support Manager              [email-masked]
 \\  Department of Family Medicine
 //  University of Washington              (206) 685-4337
 /   Box 355304                            (206) 685-0610 (Fax)
---- Seattle, WA 98195-5304 --------------------------------------------------
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