Re: nnimap: editing articles

["Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On  7 Feb 2006, reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc wrote:

On Tue, Feb 07 2006, Uwe Brauer wrote:
>
>> Well and it does not work, because when I save, and reenter the buffer
>> the editing result is not there anymore. How should the editing
>> solution work?
>
> Article editing isn't implemented in the nnimap back end.  I'm not
> sure if the protocol (IMAP) allows it.  Simon?

IMAP does not allow editing, you have to delete and store the new
article, AFAIK (from reading the rev4 RFC).

> IIRC someone suggested to move the article to a local group, edit it
> and move it back to IMAP might be a workaround.  Thunderbird 1.5
> supports deleting and detaching (stripping) attachments which works
> also on IMAP.  I just tried it and it seems to me, they do something
> similar.  At least when looking at the "modified" article with Gnus, I
> saw an `N' (`gnus-recent-mark') and the article number is different.

Right.  So basically, implementing labels is easier with flags than
with IMAP editing, and much faster.

IMAP flags can be any atom name, which means it can not contain:

( ) { % * " \ ]
space
control characters
characters with the high bit (8-bit characters)

I would stick to a-zA-Z0-9_.- as the character set...  It's probably
safer to avoid the other characters such as @ or = IMO.

A custom flag "MyFlag" can be set like this:

APPEND "Inbox" (\Seen MyFlag) [etc...]

I used a message by Mark Crispin to get this information:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.imap/msg/ab2bab9722a80272?dmode=source&hl=en

I propose that for backends that can't support flags, e.g. nntp or
nnrss, we use the gnus-registry (if installed) to track the flags by
message-ID as a fallback.

Ted