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<preface>
<title>Introduction</title>
<para><application>modest</application> is a mail user agent
(<abbrev>MUA</abbrev>) targetting small devices, in particular Nokia's
<productname>Nokia 770 Internet Tablet</productname>. This document
describes the design and implementation of this software.
</para>
<para><application>modest</application> lives at the top of a extensive
stack of software. It is built on top
of <application>tinymail</application>, and uses its libcamel
backend. It strives to the be a simple yet powerful program, geared
towards small devices, for example (but not limited
to) <productname>Nokia's 770 internet tablet</productname>. An important
goal is to minimize memory usage while still being able to handle
significant amounts of email quickly; much of that is achieved simply by
using <application>tinymail</application>, which uses a number of clever
tricks for that, such as the proxy design pattern for listing email
headers, and not needing memory for headers which are not currently
visible.
</para>
<para>
<application>modest</application>, in turn, also tries to be efficient,
fast and scalable. That means that the <abbrev>MUA</abbrev> should
support multiple user-interfaces, perhaps making it even possible to
switch between them during runtime.
</para>
<para>To summarize the goals for <application>modest</application>:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>target devices with limited amounts of memory ('limited' in 2006
terms means less than 64Mb, and of which only part can be used for
e-mail);</listitem>
<listitem>target Linux/Unix-like environments with GLib/GTK+-based
support;</listitem>
<listitem>support multiple user-interface (UIs) with as much code
sharing as possible between the different UIs.</listitem>
</itemizedlist></para>
<para>Like <application>tinymail</application>
and <application>libcamel</application>, <application>modest</application>
is programmed in C, using the <package>GObject</package>-system for
object-oriented (OO) features. For now, it specifically targets \gtk based
UIs (and derivatives like 'Hildon').</para>
</preface>
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