[Telepathy] Telepathy vs. e-mail

[Simon McVittie]

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On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 at 20:43:10 -0700, Dylan McCall wrote:
> On a more serious note, though, I was imagining that in the context of
> tubes a while ago. Indeed, it doesn't really fit the style of
> Telepathy, but I can picture a turn-based game or collaboration app
> working transparently through email. In that case it supports an
> indefinite time delay, so one can stop what he's doing, come back
> later and be dropped back at the previous state in the “conversation.”

Telepathy is a real-time communication framework. Doing a Tubes sort of thing
by e-mail might be more appropriate than Telepathy's Tubes for some
applications, but that's not Telepathy any more :-)

Similarly, it would be entirely possible to have a UI that mixes e-mails with
real-time communication, and indeed microblogging and blogging. I think
that's outside the scope of Telepathy, but I'd encourage that sort of UI to
use Telepathy for the real-time bits!

The reason there's mail notification in Telepathy is that some services
(Google Talk, MSN) provide it as a side-effect of having online presence.
If Empathy was a single monolithic client (like Pidgin or whatever),
we'd be forced to choose between displaying the information in Empathy or
discarding it, even though Empathy doesn't really have anything to do with
e-mail.

However, because of Telepathy's architecture, we can take an intermediate
approach, which is to signal it on D-Bus and let a more appropriate UI deal
with it.

That doesn't make Telepathy an appropriate way to get mail notification from
generic mail servers (IMAP/POP3) - for those, there's nothing of interest to
Telepathy, just mail notification, so the UI should just talk to the server
itself. I believe Ubuntu's messaging indicator either behaves like this, or
will do so in future.

    Simon
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