grendel
maintained by
Jeff Galyan,
and
Giao Nguyen
08-Apr-2001
Grendel is a mail/news reader entirely written in Java. Its goal is
to be a true cross-platform application with a feature set that
satisfies the poweruser.
Jeff (talisman) is taking a brief hiatus while he gets his company started. Please continue to feel free to contribute code and such to the Grendel project. Just don't expect to see much work coming from Jeff in the short term.
The Grendel source tree has been reorganized, so if you have pulled the source previously, you'll need to update with cvs update -P (that's a capital P), so CVS will prune the directories and files which are no longer used.
Support for building with Apple's Project Builder on Mac OS X is now checked in and working. The project's files are all referenced via project-relative references, so you should have no trouble. If you happen to see a file in the Files pane (except in the Products group) which is red, you'll need to change the path Project Builder uses to reference that file (or get the file and put it in the right place, per README.build). This is most likely to happen with the required external jars. If you need to select the jars, do so by clicking on something else in the Files pane first, then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to select the jar file name. Otherwise, Project Builder will attempt to open the jar file in the editor. It won't hurt anything as long as you don't save the file, but it's pretty disconcerting nonetheless. See Project Builder Help (Command-?) for details on how to do this.
Ian Clarke has donated his GFilt "learning filter" package to Grendel. GFilt uses genetic algorithms to automatically generate optimized filters based on your email folder setup. The sources have been checked in to the main source tree, but they have not yet been integrated. I felt it would be good to make them available.
- history
- Grendel was originally developed as a part of the 'Javagator' project at Netscape. This project was cancelled before completion, but after the source for Grendel was released other people started to work toward completing it. The original release was therefore incomplete.
- current state
- Since then a lot has been cleaned up. Grendel compiles now and the basic functionality to read and send e-mail is working. Grendel even has the capability of handling multiple identities, or "personalities", for getting and sending email. This allows the user to get and send email from multiple accounts using a single email client.
- outstanding issues
- There are still a number of issues to be worked on before it can be called a useful mailer. Grendel is usable right now, though some necessary features haven't been implemented yet.
| Grendel Module | Issue | Owner | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| News | Needs:
|
High | |
| POP3 | Needs:
|
Jeff Galyan, or Giao Nguyen |
High |
| IMAP | Needs:
|
Medium | |
| UI | Needs:
|
Medium | |
| HTML Message Viewing | Needs:
|
Jeff Galyan | High |
| Attachments (incoming) | Needs to be implemented | Jeff Galyan | High |
| Message Search | Needs to be implemented | Giao Nguyen | Medium |
| Message Filters | Needs to be implemented | Giao Nguyen | High |
| Addressbook | Mostly working, needs some improvement | Jeff Galyan, or Giao Nguyen |
Medium |
- the future
- We'd like to implement all sorts of filters. There's been some
discussions of filters in a XML-like language and even filters in Java
to do everything from message removal (spam!) and message
movement. What goes next is anyone's guess. Grendel can be as much
your project as it is ours.
We're open to new ideas and we invite you to implement any useful features.
- community
- Discussion takes place in the newsgroup
netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news. This newsgroup is also gatewayed to
a mailing list. More information can be found on Mozilla's
Community pages.
If you want get involved in the development of grendel, please contact us.
- tools
- To aid the development all mozilla.org tools are available for
Grendel hackers:
- CVS - Grendel is a module on it's own inside the mozilla CVS repository. More information is on the CVS page.
- LXR is a great tool to browse the source
- Bonsai is the tree control tool which can be used to track the changes to the tree. An interesting query is this one, which shows all checkins to Grendel during the last week.
- Tinderbox - There is one machine which continously downloads the whole grendel source and tries to compile it. This is to detect compile problems with the checkins.
- Bugzilla keeps track of all bugs in Grendel and who is working on them.
- documentation
- Building and running
- Libraries needed to build and run Grendel
- Build instructions
JavaMail
Design and ideas
- High level architecture description
- Intertwingle
- Some thoughts on filters
- Database requirements
- Required native methods
Links to other places
- Mozilla's C++ mail/news application
- Sun's JavaMail site
- Electrical Fire - Mozilla's JIT