mozilla mail/news introduction
History
- In Netscape-branded versions of Navigator 2.x, 3.x, and Communicator
4.x, the application had built-in support for email and newsgroups. In March
1997, the browser group brought all of their code to mozilla.org. At that
time, the mail group was focused on enterprise customers and the features
which shipped in Communicator 4.5.
- In the middle of Communicator
4.5, we attempted to bring all the Messenger code into mozilla, and
do 4.5 at the same time. This "Normandy" effort failed, and was abandoned.
- After Communicator 4.5 shipped, the mozilla/5.0 effort had a major change in direction to use the Gecko layout engine and the XPFE user interface toolkit.
- Netscape's mail/news group brought over the core parts of Messenger
into the original mozilla/5.0 effort.
- Netscape's mail/news group and many other mozilla contributors pounded
away and mail/news was part of Mozilla 1.0
Where are we now?
In mozilla 1.0, mail/news had support SMTP, POP3, IMAP, NNTP, LDAP, S/MIME,
the three pane UI, multiple accounts, searching and filtering, message composition,
address book, preferences, etc.
What's missing?
We are hoping that future versions of the product will contain all of
these features. If you're interested in the above features, you can
always get involved.
Known Problem Areas
- performance
and footprint always needs work.
- In Communicator 4.5, we built database infrastructure to support
very large address books. The reason to do this work was to support replicas
of LDAP directories for offline use. Our open source in memory db, called
mork, currently isn't suited for large addressbooks. We don't meet
the scalability target we had in 4.5.
- Addressbook needs work
- Compose window is slow to come up. (We've done some work on
this, but there's more we could do.)
What about SmartMail and Grendel?
- Initially, mozilla mail/news capitalized on a number of the ideas
shown in SmartMail. We use RDF and XPFE, although
those technologies have evolved somewhat since SmartMail was shown. We didn't
use much actual code from SmartMail. To increate performance, some of
the uses of RDF were removed. But some (folder datasource, account datasource,
directory datasource) are still in use.
- Grendel is a separate effort
to write a new mail/news client in Java. Netscape never shipped Grendel,
but did release the code. Most Netscape people currently working on mail/news
are not familiar with Grendel, but we'd like to consider any good ideas developed
for Grendel. Netscape's mail/news engineers won't be enhancing Grendel.