[alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[Krzysztof Ilowiecki <k@ilowiecki.com>]

Hello

summary: I'm new, would like to help, have lots of ideas, some time
and some python.

The list welcome message invites to introducing myself, so I shall
comply, even if this appears to be some configuration relic ;)
I'm using the [alot] tag as it looks to be what I'm most likely to
contribute to.

I'm sysadmin/programmer and a physics student. I've been writing
anything significant in Python for only a year now, but have
previous experience with C. I prefer to contribute in Python, though.
I've been a vim user for nearly eight years, though only recently did I
start using things like macros or global commands and writing functions.

My experience of email is that I hated it until I started using Gmail
in 2004. Since then I merely dislike it :) Or rather, I dislike the
MUAs.

notmuch has made a very good impression on me and I would like to
migrate to it away from gmail. I happen to have some time
available now.

I understand it is quite hard to provide an overview for newcomers of
the state of a rapidly developing project. Please correct me if the
following assertions are wrong:
 * emacs frontend is the most mature, enough for quite some people
  to use it as their primary MUA
 * alot is second, but is rather ambitious and very far from '1.0'
   * I could use it without a need to fall back to the emacs one
 * vim frontend is interesting, quite a bit less complete, and stalled
 * curses-notmuch is dead

I would like to try and help writing a python terminal vim-friendly
client. Alot seems like by far the bast candidate, however I have the
impression that it may be trying to do too much for my needs, which may
be peculiar. I have installed offlineimap+notmuch+alot on a slow laptop
running Debian wheezy. It is looking good with a testing account and I'm
considering connecting it to live accounts. How likely is it to mess
things up in IMAP?

I understand synchronisation across machines and with IMAP is something
of an issue so far. How bad would it be to use git for that - and for
'undo'? It would appear some people use git+maildir even instead of
IMAP, but I guess the notmuch's database may be completely unsuitable...

Does alot have some sort of the design documentation, sketched vision it
is heading towards? I think I should write down my ideas before I get
too entangled in the implementation details, it would be good to
know if something like this is already available.

Kris Iłowiecki