Bruno Abrantes

After much discussion and back-and-forth of ideas, I think we’ve finally nailed it, and, let me tell you, this is going to be wayyyyyy better than the iPad. Ok, not better, but still pretty damn close.

Round 1

Our first idea, and one that actually got quite a bit of traction, was to slap a mean and lean email client on a widget. It would use IMAP, and so would let you keep track of any account on whichever service you use (most provide an IMAP connection these days). This sounds neat, until you realize that a widget has precious few real-estate. Doing this in a widget meant we’d have to severely cut down on some features (dropping message composing and sending was tossed around), and simply would not do as the only email features in SAPO Campus.

Round 2

After ditching the widget format, we started to think about how we’d fit an email interface alongside our already existing interfaces. Right about at the same time, we started a major overhaul of our user profile system, and decided we’d integrate these new features in tandem with the already existing My Homewidget-based PLE. Under this new system, a user’s url (take mine, for example) would provide access to his/hers Profile, My Home and Portfolio platforms. Taking into account this new structure, it dawned on us that it made perfect sense to add an Email icon to the top navigation, and integrate the now illusory email client into the user’s PLE.

Neatorama! But wait!

Designing and developing an email client is no walk in the park. In fact, here’s how I think the experience would go down. Go ahead and read it, inhale the pain etched on those words, and then come back. Seriously, I’ll wait.

Design-wise, it’s just very hard to come up with an email client experience that doesn’t suck. All of the clients I’ve gone through sucked. Some of them sucked a little less (wink wink Gmail & Mail.app) but, at the core, most of the whole email thing is boring and hard. Whenever I’m emailing, I actually wish I was having a taco somewhere in Mexico with some random girl named Consuela.

Development-wise, there’s all these hoops to go through. Using IMAP takes away some of the pain, but it’s still like giving birth to a small elephant. I’m not going to pretend I know what the actual problems would be, because just thinking about it makes me want to get another taco and ring up Consuela. Let’s just agree it’s a pain in the rear end of the human body.

Enter the Roundcube

After some Googling around, Roundcube started sounding like one of the best open-source webmail clients out there. Technology-wise, everything they use seems to be compatible with our setup. The interface is actually pretty decent, and it’s clearly designed to look and feel like a desktop application, so it’s pretty well in line with our existing platform.

Using an out-of-the-box system such as Roundcube allows us to skip much of the boring stuff and get a functional version out the door very soon, but it does pose a few obstacles:

• It’s pretty much your standard email client, so this means I won’t get to reinvent emailing (again!) anytime soon. According to my own reasoning, this means it will suck. The challenge is in making it suck as little as possible, and try to live up to the decent email clients already out there.
• It’s supposed to be a standalone solution, so getting it to play nice with our own user database tables is probably going to resemble that scene in Lion King where Simba is trampled by a crazed pack of Gnus.