Re: Do nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent for nnimap?

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

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Sun, 06 Oct 2002, Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE wrote:
>> In principle, it should be possible to use
>> nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent for nnimap, too.  But there are some
>> issues, and I'm looking for ideas about them and about issues I
>> missed.
>
> I'd love this functionality!

Me too 8-)

>> nnmail-cache-insert looks for the "primary mail backend" and only
>> inserts the group name without server name.  My idea was to extend
>> this mechanism to record which server the group is in.  Now the
>> cache lines are msg id, then tab, then group.  I could add another
>> tab and then the server.  That would make the format
>> backward-compatible.  The code would assume the primary mail backend
>> for lines missing the server.
>
> Why not store the group name as Gnus shows it, e.g. when moving
> articles?  nnxyz+abcdef:groupname is what I'm thinking of.  Then the
> unqualified groups are in the primary backend - as they would be if
> you manually moved articles around.  I'm talking as a Gnus user, maybe
> the implementation is much more complex that way.  I don't know the
> internals of mail moving.

The problem is backward compatibility.  Suppose people have nntp as
their primary server, and nnml and nnimap as secondary servers.  Then
right now foo.bar means the group nnml:foo.bar (because nnml is the
"primary mail backend"), but your suggestion would change it to mean
a group on the nntp server.

But maybe I'm overlooking something obvious?

(One possibility would be to make all groups be prefixed, maybe
we could use "native" for the primary server.)

>> It would be really cool if ~/.nnmail-cache was stored on the server
>> somehow.  Is there a way to store data like this alongside IMAP mail
>> on a server?
>
> I think the network usage would be too high for this.

You must be kidding.  Right now, nnimap splitting transfers each
message over the net twice (one fetch from nnimap:INBOX, one put to
the target group).  I don't see how it can hurt to add 60 or 80 bytes
to this traffic.

No offense intended.

(It conceivable that .nnmail-cache must always be transferred in
full, maybe via ange-ftp.  This is a bad solution indeed, and for
this your counter argument would be right.  I wasn't even considering
such bad solutions before you mentioned the possibility :-)

>> Hm.  Actually I'm going to be really really really really busy
>> starting in a couple of days, so I'm afraid this might be no more
>> than some wishful thinking and day-dreaming :-|
>
> I hope someone else has interest in this!

Right.

kai
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