a suggestion for a Notes plugin re-design

[WJCarpenter-4]

I was going to remove the "notes" plugin from my local SM installation
because I thought nobody was using it.  Someone was, so I'm going to
keep it.  However, once my attention got focused on it, I started having
ideas for how to improve the implementation.  Of course, I'm not
planning to actually do anything about these ideas except mention them
here.  I see that the notes plugin is up for adoption, but I won't be
doing the adopting.  Making work for someone else is one of my
strengths.  :-)

The notes are stored as hex-encoded values as SM prefs items with names
like "notes_1", "notes_2", etc.  (Previous versions of the plugin stored
the notes in the filesystem, but I've forgotten the details.)  Perhaps
because of this, there are system config items to limit the number and
size of user notes.  The storage of the notes seems suboptimal to me,
and some of the custom UI for manipulating the notes falls out of them
being special little pieces of data.

My suggestion would be to store the notes as messages in a
specially-designated IMAP folder.  (The name of the folder could be
specified by individual users, but let me call it "MyNotes" as an
example here.)  In a lot of ways, MyNotes could be just a variation on
Drafts.  By storing notes as messages, you automatically get a Subject
and Date field, and you could automatically do HTML formatting and have
attachments.  Notes would also be visible in a generic way to other IMAP
clients.  In fact, you could just use the Drafts folder features of SM,
but that would be a little confusing to non-technical users.  By using
an IMAP folder, MyNotes would also be counted in any space quota
mechanisms (not important to me right now, but could be important to
someone).

So, I would suggest that the Notes implementation start with the Drafts
handling code in SM and tidy up the UI so that it's more
notes-oriented.  You might, for example, change "Resume Draft" to "Edit
Note", suppress the addressee fields, and so on.


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