Michele,
The e-mail client is in the alpha (or as Paul said pre-alpha) stage. Please be patient as he implements all features. Our goal is to provide the answer to the problem facing most companies using e-mail as a substitute for FTP transfer. Another problem is forwarding e-mail between members of the same organization and this is just insane. Of course attachments are number one priority as well.
The typical scenario today is like this: (Bill, Mary, Julie and Mike work for XYZ Company):
[list:1y0n4hwm]
[*:1y0n4hwm]Joe Doe sends an e-mail to Bill with 5 MB attachment[/*:m:1y0n4hwm]
[*:1y0n4hwm]Bill decides that Mary needs to see it and forwards it to her[/*:m:1y0n4hwm]
[*:1y0n4hwm]Mary decides that Julie is the person to take care of this so she forwards it to her as well[/*:m:1y0n4hwm]
[*:1y0n4hwm]and so on[/*:m:1y0n4hwm][/list:u:1y0n4hwm]
As a result we have:
5 MB attachment in Bill's Inbox + 5 MB in his Sent Items folder = 10 MB
5 MB attachment in Mary's Inbox + 5 MB in his Sent Items folder = 10 MB
5 MB 5 MB attachment in julie's Inbox = 5 MB
Total: 25 MB wasted space
(in real life scanarios look much worse)
In addition Mike does not (nor other people from XYZ) have access to any of the e-mails or attachments. This is one of the problems that we try to fix.
Our e-mail client will support POP3 and IMAP protocols. Because a lot of mail is junk/SPAM we can not afford to waste space and store messages immediately in the database. Therefore each user has separate mail data folder as a staging area. Those folders store e-mails in mbox format. Each user can have multiple accounts.
When e-mail arrives it will be compared against contacts database and will be automatically whitelisted if sender's e-mail is found. Therefore in the example above if Mary would open Joe Doe's e-mail it would be shown as coming from a trusted sender even though she never received e-mail from him before. But we will go one step further.
Bill will see the e-mail coming from Joe Doe (one of his contacts) and in addition to Reply, Forward and other normal options he will be able to move the message into e-mail history of this contact. Once this is done every epesi user will be able to see this e-mail and there will be no need to forward it. Additionally e-mail will be split into text message (stored in the database) and the attachment (stored as a file). There will be only one instance of the attachment shared between all epesi users. Mike therefore will be able to open Joe's contact and see that he sent this e-mail to Bill.
Of course e-mails can be marked as Public or Private to prevent unauthorized access. Besides the entire contact could be private. But we want to stop using e-mail as reminders, to-do list and all other things that e-mail should not be used for.
Now imagine that I don't even have to get a note from Bill that he received an e-mail from Joe Doe. Using our watchdog module I can subscribe to Joe's contact and immediately see on my dashboard on the subscription applet that new e-mail was saved (added) to his history. If I want to see what it is I can just click on the link, no need to manually forward messages by Bill, no wasted space.
Again, please be patient as we implement those features. I am sure you will like it.