New Mozilla Project: Stand Alone Mail (Minotaur)

[Scott MacGregor]

Jason Kersey and I are very excited to announce our effort to build a
stand alone version of mozilla mail, currently called Project Minotaur*.
We are reviving the project started by Seth Spitzer back in September.

Our goal is to produce a cross platform stand alone mail application
using the XUL user interface language. We are modeling ourselves after
the Phoenix rewrite of the Mozilla browser.

Our intended customer is someone who uses Phoenix (or another non
mozilla.exe browser) as their primary browser and wants a mail client
based on mozilla that "plays nice" with their browser.

In addition, by focusing solely on stand alone mail, we believe we can
make some dents in the overall footprint and performance of the mail
client by removing components and chrome we don't need. On top of that,
the UI becomes much cleaner as a stand alone application as opposed to
being part of the mozilla suite.

Minotaur has several new features over mozilla mail including
customizeable toolbars ala Phoenix and a more simplified prefs and menu UI.

We are currently driving towards our 0.1 release which is based off of
the Mozilla 1.3 Branch. After we move to the trunk, our long term goals
will include: moving to the phoenix toolkit and developing a theme
modeled after the Qute theme for Phoenix.

We hope to start pushing builds on ftp.mozilla.org within the next day
or so. For more information, including how to build minotaur, please see
our project page at:

http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/minotaur

Thanks!
-Scott and Jason

P.S. In case I messed up the follow up, please reply to
netscape.mozilla.mailnews.

*As with other Mozilla projects, our code name is subject to change
pending approval/blessing from mozilla.rg staff.
Phoenix --> ??
Chimera --> Camino.
Minotaur --> ???

=)