Gaia/Email

Design Specs

Interaction

For the latest UX specifications, please visit: https://mozilla.box.com/applications

Visual

• new building blocks page
• old building blocks page, fairly broken
• Things you can look at but are not canonical; these are inputs to the building blocks / UX process:
  • some building block proposals you can look at
  • visual demonstration of some proposed transitions

Development

The e-mail app consists of a back-end which is developed in https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia-email-libs-and-more and a front-end which is developed as part of Gaia at https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/tree/master/apps/email. The intent of separating the library from the UI is to make the back-end reusable. The primary motivation is to allow a keyboard-friendly desktop UI to be developed against the library without trying to have a single UI trying to meet two radically different use cases.

To re-cap, check out these projects / repositories:

• https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia
• https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia-email-libs-and-more

Features

See Gaia/Email/Features for a partial list of things we currently support or don't support.

Implementation

The following pages are an attempt to describe how the e-mail implementation works without requiring you to read the block comments in the source code in order to understand. The goal is to provide context of the e-mail problem domain and our approach to dealing with it. We are not going to go into low-level details because those can change frequently, but we will try to strike a balance by linking to the source code and its block comments.

• Gaia/Email/Implementation/Limits: Maximum sizes of things, stuff like that.
• Gaia/Email/Implementation/MailSynchronization: General sync strategy, how we sync IMAP, and how we sync ActiveSync. Sadly, these are very different things because they are very different protocols.
• Gaia/Email/Implementation/MessageDisplayAndAttachments: Plaintext mail, HTML mail, quoting, attachments!

• Gaia/Email/Implementation/FakeServers: Fake IMAP and ActiveSync servers for testing purposes.

Standardization Efforts

• Gaia/Email/Standards/PushNotifications: We want to try and get IMAP servers to support our WebAPI/SimplePush API, which just means being able to PUT/POST a small amount of data to a URL.

Testing

• Front-End Tests
  • live in the gaia repo
  • Tests by default run against
• Back-End Tests
  • live in the gaia-email-libs-and-more repo (aka GELAM). For info on the tests in general, see: Gaia/Email/LoggestTestFramework
  • run against JS implemented fake-servers by default, but can be run against real servers as well.
  • contain a mixture of test types:
    • unit tests. examples: test_intl_unit.js (simple), test_folder_storage.js (complex)
    • higher level tests. ex: test_imap_general.js
    • end-to-end-ish tests. ex: test_compose.js (creates a message with an attachment, sends mail to itself, checks the messages and the attachment, sends a reply, etc.)

Dependencies

(or rather, dependencies with wiki pages that tell you stuff)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Email/ActiveSync

Historical

• Gaia/Email/HistoricalReqs: Historial requirements and use cases that are misleading to keep on this page.