This is a prototype of the draft IMAPSN client specification found at http://imapsn.github.com/2010/imapsn-client.html.

The hope is that this will grow into a reference implementation.

I think IMAPSN has the potential to see wide spread use. If you want to write some code that reaches a lot of users please take a look at the project and see if there is anything you'd like to help with. There is a rough task list for the java implementation in the file tasklist.markdown. If you want to tackle one of the tasks in that file please send an email to the mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/imapsn-dev to avoid any duplicated effort. Other ways you could help out are:

* review the spec and suggest improvements
* review existing java code and suggest improvements
* write tests for existing code
* start a library for python, C++, or some other language

Ideally I think it will be useful to have libraries in java, python, and c++. I'm focusing my limited resources on libraries first with the hope that once they are available, other developers will experiment with developing UIs. To bootstrap intrest I may sponser a contest with a cash prize for the best UI.

Some options for UI's are

* Google app engine 
* Thunderbird plug-in
* Outlook plug-in
* Squirrelmail plug-in
* Gmail gadgets <http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/gadgets>

Although MUA's aren't exactly the hot technology of the future, I think there are a lot of existing email users who don't do social networking and who might take the plunge if they can just take an incremental step without having to sign up for anything or check anything new. So I think the plug-ins will be an important part of boot-strapping the platform.