Re: Offline mail and group cooperation

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> grossjoh@lothlorien.cs.uni-dortmund.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:
>
>> I guess that nnimap and Gnus Agent is still one of the major
>> alternatives.  I remember that I tried it a long time ago and I was
>> confused about which messages it wanted to download automatically.  I
>> guess that we want to download all messages (regardless of marks) in
>> selected groups.  Is this possible with the Agent?  
>
> Right now the Agent is hard coded to never download articles marked as
> read in Gnus.  I posted a (very lightly tested) patch to fix this long
> time ago, but never committed it as it breaks backwards compatibility
> (people that want the old behaviour had to add a `read' Agent
> predicate to only download read articles, which was the old
> behaviour).

So what do you think about the current implementation?  Is it really
horrible?

>> The common groups could be handled via shared folders.  But I think
>> we would want separated marks.  Does Cyrus allow us to say which
>> marks should be per-user and which should be per-folder?  
>
> Not fully fine grained, I think, but it may be enough.  Look at
> setting ACLs on mailboxes, I remember being able to say whether a user
> was permitted to set global flags.  ACLs could probably be used to
> exclude students from mailboxes too.

So when they are not allowed to set global flags, they automatically
set per-user ones, or what?  That's cool.

If the flag changes just don't happen at all, that would be bad.

>> And then there is the thorny problem that nnimap/agent do not allow
>> moving of messages from one group to another while offline, right?
>
> Right.

Yet another challenge.  I wish somebody would do something :-)
But who am I to complain.  I'm already enjoying immensely the new
agent header caching!

>> (And if we do IMAP, then I think I want to do my splitting using
>> ifilter.  But that would have to be done on the server side, and how
>> does ifilter on the server know that I've moved a message?)
>
> Can't you split when you plug in?

You mean, invoke ifile from nnimap-split-rule?  Hm.  I guess that
would work.  But it would be somewhat difficult to get ifile up to
speed with the current messages.

Does anyone have something which will download messages from the IMAP
server and hand them over to ifile to say "lookee-here, this message
was filed in the foo.bar group"?

Lessee now.  I think splitting is done on the headers, right?  So
even when it happens it would be nontrivial to pass the whole message
to ifile for examination.

> Generally I think there are dragons in the IMAP and Agent interaction,
> so other mechanisms are probably easier to get to work, but it would
> be useful if you had time to try to get it to work.

Well, at the moment I'm surprised I found so few problems.  No
dragons to be seen.

Do you have any idea where to look for dragons?

kai
-- 
~/.signature is: umop ap!sdn    (Frank Nobis)