Prototyping an IMAP mail client

Today I spent a few hours of hacking on an IMAP mail client in Ruby which I codenamed "liam" (backwards for mail, haha, how funny). I based it on basically two libraries, namely Ruby's Net::IMAP, which provides a very complete (but a bit complicated) interface to IMAP, and Clifford's STFL, the Structured Terminal Forms Library, which is pretty new, but definitely the best ncurses widget library around.

The functionality is currently really simple: you start the program, it connects to your IMAP server, reads all available mailboxes from it, and lets the user decide which one to open. After selecting the right mailbox from the list, it is opened and the message envelopes from this mailbox are downloaded. Then, the user can again select the message he wants to view. Then, the message is downloaded and the raw message is presented to the user using the less(1) pager. The user can view this message. When he quits less, he is again presented with the list of messages in the mailbox. To return to the list of mailboxes, a simple press of the 'q' key is enough. From there, it is possible to select another mailbox, or to quit liam by again pressing 'q'.

This probably sounds pretty difficult, but it's extremely simple. To visualize this more efficiently, I prepared a simple screencast, which you can view here.

But what is my goal with this prototype? I don't know yet. It is definitely not here to replace mutt-ng (which is not dead yet, I'm currently preparing a "relaunch" since I now know my requirements much better than at the beginning of the project), but it's more a prototype to experiment on the future of terminal-based email clients. Sooner or later, mutt (and mutt-ng) will require a rewrite, and with this prototype I can find out what will be important for a new design, and where the stumbling blocks might be. Anyway, any feedback is welcome.

Update: more hacking on liam (including a new STFL widget), and a new screencast to demonstrate email viewing.