Re: editing nnimap articles

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:05:34 -0400 Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> wrote: 

DC> I receive so many attachments that I find it necessary to use
DC> gnus-mime-save-part-and-strip to delete them from my archived messages.
DC> I'm in the process of converting from nnfolder to nnimap, and so I'd
DC> like to investigate how hard it would be to extend nnimap to allow
DC> article editing.  

DC> My sense is that it should not be hard, since it just requires the
DC> creation of a new article and the deletion of the old one, and both of
DC> those are operations that nnimap can perform.  (In fact, I just noticed
DC> that `B I' is able to create a new empty article in an nnimap group.)

DC> In digging through the code, it looks to me like what would be needed
DC> would be an implementation of nnimap-request-replace-article.
DC> Would that just be a matter of combining nnimap-request-accept-article
DC> with something like

DC>            (imap-message-flags-add (format "%d" article)
DC>                                    "\\Seen \\Deleted")
DC> ?

DC> Would this work?  Can someone help me fill in the details?

With IMAP, you have to expunge as well, but then you may expunge other
deleted articles at the wrong time.  So you may just have to live with
the old \\Deleted article until the next time the user or Gnus expunges
the group, and it will still show up in the summary buffer.  I think
that's acceptable.

It would be good if this edit told the registry about the changeover by
getting the record for the old message ID and storing it with the new
one.  I can add that hook.

Otherwise this looks good to me, I'm all for it.  I've been doing it the
roundabout way (move to nnmaildir, edit, move back) for years.

Ted