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What is going to come next?

Below you can get an overview of the next stages as they are currently planned
(Since estimates on the timing are always wrong, I don't bother with that):


Beam 0.92 is currently planned to contain the following functionality:

  • Full mail-filtering for inbound mail, based on the mail-filtering language SIEVE (RFC3028).

    The usual filter-actions (move to folder, delete mail, tag mail, start external program...) will be implemented and the filtering itself is done via regex-matches against specific header-fields, the complete header, the mail body and probably some artificial tests (e.g.: mail does not contain any of my addresses, good for spam-filters).

    Individual filter-rules can be ordered along a filter-chain, which will be processed sequentially for each incoming mail until a filter tells it to stop or the chain's end is reached (in the latter case the mail is simply put into the 'in'-folder).

    There will be a GUI for setting up these filters, of course, but the resulting mail-filter descriptions will be stored in text-files for easier adaption, export, etc.

  • Online user-documentation

    The (HTML-based) documentation will be available in the Preferences for sure (where I think it is needed most), but it will cover other topics as well.


Beam 0.93 is currently planned to contain the following functionality:

  • An addressbook by means of the people database.

    This addressbook will be accessible in the prefs as well as when editing/viewing mails.

  • Virtual folders, like in Postmaster and Scooby, with a Prefs-Page to set them up.

Beam 0.94 is currently planned to contain the following functionality:

  • Mailing-list support with automatic threading

    The mailing list support will try to make it easy to reply correctly (to the list or to the person).

    Threading is a special sorting mode in the mailref-listview that groups mails hierarchically, based on messageIDs, subjects and date parsing.


Beam 0.95 is currently planned to contain the following functionality:

  • Advanced message-searches

    This will be similar to virtual folders, but with searches you will be able to do things that the attribute-based virtual folders can't (you can search through the mail-body, for instance). Due to this fact, searches will probably be a lot slower than virtual folders.

    Once a search has been defined, it will show up in the folderview as a search-folder with all the matching mails underneath.

    Since searches can be much slower than BeOS-queries, they will not start automatically, but only upon explicit request.

    Searches can be made persistent, in that case they will show up in the folderview next time Beam is started (while temporary searches will be gone).


After that, there is much more to do, but I am not sure in which order I should proceed:

  • Full SASL support, for more secure logins
  • Decent IMAP support
  • Secure transport (SSL/TLS) by means of OpenSSL
  • Secure mail-content by means of GnuPrivacyGuard

If you want to express your view on the future of Beam, please do!

Last updated: 12/05/02
beam@hirschkaefer.de


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