Re: That newfangled IMAP thing...

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> Greg Troxel <gdt@work.lexort.com> writes:
>
>> Right now I have a mail-notification widget in the status tray that
>> tells me if INBOX has unread messages.  But it would be nice if the
>> unread count in INBOX automatically reflected what was happening in
>> IMAP, so that I could see the 1 from the arrived message and just hit
>> space to enter INBOX without typing g.  I would only want gnus to IDLE
>> on a tiny number of mailboxes, probably just 1.
>
> Ah, right, you could IDLE on a mailbox without being in the group.  But
> you can only IDLE on one mailbox at a time?  (Without having several
> connections open, that is.)

Yes.  That makes it essentially useless for anyone doing server-side splitting
without additional work, or one connection per folder.

The LEMONADE working group, who are trying to get IETF standards for "mobile
push email" style stuff, are working on improvements, and someone proposed a
"multi-IDLE" that would deal with all mailboxes, but none of those are
standard.  (...or implemented, AFAIK, by any real IMAP servers.)

> But updating the group buffer lines on IDLE would make perfect sense, I
> think, and be useful.

For folks who used Gnus-side splitting it would be valuable that the IMAP
implementation returned to the INBOX and sat in IDLE, so it could also trigger
automatic filtering inside Gnus.

This would be double-plus extra nice if they wanted to use Gnus splitting
*and* be able to use some other client talking to that IMAP server.

My partner, for complicated historical reasons, usually has her computer at
home running Thunderbird when we travel, since she does client-side filtering
with that, and doesn't want that stopped while reading mail through the web
interface only.

        Daniel
-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel@rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
               ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons