Re: Not downloading attachments over IMAP

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Kai Großjohann wrote:

> > Yup.  multipart/external.  But isn't it kind of gross to have the backend
> > change the contents of a message?  I wouldn't want that.  But I guess it 
> > could be useful.  Hm.
> 
> Maybe the real solution is for Gnus to provide a way to fetch the
> MIME tree for a message from the backend.  But I think that so far,
> there is only one backend which allows for retrieval of the MIME
> tree: nnimap.

Right.  Gnus should fetch the MIME tree if the backend supports it, 
otherwise it should fetch the entire message and parse MIME itself.

> Maybe rewriting nnimap to do what I suggested would also help in
> devising a good interface for retrieving the MIME tree, and then the
> nnimap functions can be moved into the Gnus proper, more or less: you
> have nnchoke-retrieve-mime-tree which returns a useful data
> structure, and the Gnus proper then decides what to do with it.
> You'll also need nnchoke-retrieve-mime-part, of course.
> 
> How about that?

Yup.  The problem is that making the above work is not enough, you would
need to fix the rest of Gnus to understand this as well.  Caching, Agent,
scoring and whatnot.

It would probably mean almost the same amount of work as replacing the
backend interface with something based on wmperry's URL package and thus
turning Gnus into a mail oriented URL browser (W3 being the web oriented
URL browser).  Which would be way cooler.