From: HyperMail_www@associate.com
Date: Tue Feb 23 1999 - 19:15:56 CST
Hi,
I did some research into "presentation formats" for tools similar to
Hypermail and Mhonarc. While simple and functional, Hypermail's
presentation, artistically, of messages is not visually impressive.
I began having thoughts of finding a format that reminded me of
reading mail in a nice GUI application.
A growingly popular tool LIKE Hypermail in some respects, is web
based e-mail. Many of these tools support file attachments, just as
Hypermail does. We could learn from work done on these programs.
Two of the more visually developed web-based mail reading tools (IMO)
are AcmeMail (http://www.astray.com/acmemail/) and IMP
(http://web.horde.org/imp/download.shtml). Both are GPL'd and are
highly functional tools, though both lack message threading.
Unfortunately, both tools require a lot to get running...AcmeMail
requires lots of non-standard Perl modules, and IMP requires a web
server with PHP3, along with IMAP & MySQL.
A runner-up is AtDot (http://www.nodomainname.net/software/atdot/)
which, also GPL'd, is really at 2.0b3 if you go to their beta area at
http://www.nodomainname.net/pub/AtDot/beta/
AtDot has some interesting problems with attachments, and a simple
presentation format, but I suspect these can be improved. I think
AtDot will become the premiere GPL'd web-based e-mail tool soon.
It's easy to set up, very powerful, and quite fast for Perl.
One program written in c++ I couldn't review because it requires
compiling the CGI++ library which was based on GCC and libg++. I'm
on egcs now |-:. It's at http://www.webthing.com/software/mail.html
and is NOT GPL'd.
After all this research, I concluded that Hypermail is still for me
because of its speed and GPL status. I'm hoping that the bugs I
identified in my recent previous post will be squashed. I committed
to adding TABLE support as an option, since that's one feature
sorely missing which I added to my customized 1.02 version here.
I'd be eager to see someone else here work on the "visual appeal"
aspects. (-:
Regards,