Re: marks in gnus / uw imapd: what marks / how to set?

[John Owens <jowens@ece.ucdavis.edu>]

Simon Josefsson writes:
    John Owens <jowens@ece.ucdavis.edu> writes:
    
    > Simon Josefsson writes:
    >     The Gnusish way to do this would be to make Gnus read VM mailboxes
    >     properly.  I wonder if this is difficult.  Is the VM mailbox format
    >     described anywhere?  Maybe it is just babyl and some external marks
    >     stuff?  I'm not really familiar with VM.
    >
    > It's not a hard format. My elisp fu is weak, but I would certainly be
    > willing to help with the transition. It's a simple format: every
    > message has the following header:
    >
    > X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil t nil nil nil nil]
    > 	["2009" "Monday" "4" "August" "2003" "09:23:04" "+0200" "Simon Josefsson" "jas@extundo.com" "<iluu18xrinb.fsf@latte.josefsson.org>" "58" "Re: marks in gnus / uw imapd: what marks / how to set?" "^From:" nil nil "8" nil nil (number " " mark "  R  Simon Josefsson   Aug  4   58/2009  " thread-indent "\"Re: marks in gnus / uw imapd: what marks / how to set?\"\n") nil nil nil nil nil nil]
    > 	nil)
    
    What format is the file?  mbox, babyl, etc?  It sounds pretty simple
    to add a nnvm, if the files is in a already supported format.  Simply
    copy nnmbox or nnbabyl, remove some cruft and add a
    nnvm-request-update-info that frob Gnus's flags using the headers.
    
It's just mbox, with this one magic header per message (X-VM-v5-Data)
that contains the marks, and a bunch of other magic headers on only
the first message in the folder (X-VM-Message-Order,
X-VM-Summary-Format, X-VM-Labels, X-VM-VHeader, X-VM-Last-Modified,
X-VM-IMAP-Retrieved, X-VM-POP-Retrieved, and X-VM-Bookmark), none of
which make any difference for this purpose and can be safely ignored
(and probably should be deleted).

    Hm, if you can create a VM mailbox with say 5 messages with some
    different flags and make it available, I can attempt to create a nnvm.
    
I'll send you a file separately, and if anyone else is interested in
looking at such a file, please let me know and I'll send it to you
too. I'm sure it's a simple (< 1 hour) task for someone familiar with
creating a nn.

On another note, then, let's say I want to do a one-to-one conversion
of VM folders to nnimap folders. What would be the procedure for doing
this if I don't want to do anything other than the one-to-one mapping
(i.e. I don't want to run through new splitting rules)? Any way to do
this for each of ~200 folders efficiently?

JDO