Small design doc

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+
+The Evolution Project specification
+Miguel de Icaza.
+
+
+* Introduction
+
+	Evolution is a project aiming at providing the free software
+	community with a professional, high-quality tool for managing
+	mail, appointments, tasks and other personal information
+	tools.
+
+	We want to make Evolution a system that addresses our needs
+	(the free software development community) and we believe that
+	by addressing our needs, we will provide a system that will
+	scale in the years to come for other users that are just
+	starting to use computers and the internet.
+
+	The main objectives of Evolution are to provide these powerful
+	features, and to make the user interface as pretty and
+	polished as possible.
+
+	Evolution is a GNOME application.
+
+	Evolution will copy the best user interface bits and the best
+	ideas and features found on contemporary groupware systems.
+
+* The overall organization
+
+	A bar similar to outlook provides shortcuts for accessing the
+	various resources managed by Evolution: mail folders,
+	contacts, tasks, journal entries, notes, messages and other
+	user-defined destinations. 
+
+* User interface widgets
+
+** The ETable package
+
+	This package provides a way of displaying and editing tables.
+
+	Tables are displayed based on a TableColumn definition that
+	defines the layout used for the display.  Table Columns can be
+	nested, and the package does grouping of information displayed
+	according to the criteria defined there.
+
+	This is used in multiple places troughout evolution: it is
+	used for the Mail summary display, for the TODO display and
+	TODO new data entry and for the address book.
+
+	Nesting in the address book can be performed on various
+	fields.  For example, a first level of nesting could be
+	"Company" and a second level would be "Country" the result is
+	a 2-level tree that can be collapsed expanded and contains the
+	information sorted/grouped by those two criteria.
+
+	The user interface for this will be copied from Outlook: the
+	possibility of adding and removing fields with drag and drop
+	as well as grouping using drag and drop.
+
+* The Mail system
+
+** The Mail sources
+
+	The mail system will support 4 sources of mail:
+
+		POP3 (transfer to a local file).
+		IMAP
+		Local mbox format in $MAIL.
+		Local mbox format that have other delivery points.
+
+	On top of that, it will be possible to browse existing mbox
+	archives (and possibly other formats in the future, like
+	Mailbox and Maildir).
+
+** Storing the mail
+
+	Mail that gets incorporated into the system is stored in mbox
+	format, and summary files are provided for quick access to the
+	files.  No modifications to the file on disk is performed (I
+	am not quite sure about this, perhaps we want to add the
+	status flags and some method for adding metadata to the mail).
+
+	Summary files are rebuilt on demand or rebuild if the mbox
+	file and the summary file have got out of sync.
+
+	A Metadata system that will enable us to attach information to
+	a message will have to be designed and implemented (enabling
+	users to add annotations to mails, and special keywords and
+	flags in a per-message fashion).
+
+** Virtual folders
+
+	Virtual folders will enable users to read/browse their mail in
+	new ways: by specifying search criterias, these folders will
+	contain messages that match the criteria given.  
+
+	There is more information about this in the libcamel
+	directory. 
+
+	We will index all headers from a message, and possible the
+	contents of messages and keep those on a separate file, to
+	enable users to query their mail database.
+
+** Mail summary display
+
+	The summary will be displayed using the ETable package, to
+	enable users to add a number of sorting criteria and various
+	display methods for the summary view.
+
+	The Outlook methods for displaying will be present on the
+	system.
+
+	Message threading will be supported in Evolution.
+
+** Message display engine
+
+	We are going to be using a combination of
+	libcamel/limime/libjamie to parse messages and render them
+	into an HTML buffer.
+
+* The HTML engine
+
+	The GtkHTML engine will be used to display messages, and will
+	be extended to support a number of features that we require:
+	internal handling of characters will be based on Unicode
+
+* The message composer
+
+	Regular features found in composers will be added: connecting
+	the composer to the address book, support for drag and drop
+	for including attachments, editing the message, archiving
+	drafts and archiving messages sent.
+
+	We will probably be extending the GtkHTML engine to support
+	editing of HTML text.