Visual appeal of Hypermail

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,

Glen_Stewart_at_associate.com Received on Wed 24 Feb 1999 03:17:00 AM GMT