Re: What now? (was: Forwarding Mail Messages)

["Jody M. Klymak" <jklymak@apl.washington.edu>]

>>>>> "LMI" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

    LMI> But is there anything major, like MIME, left to implement.
    LMI> Is Gnus (don't say it!) getting feature-complete?

Hi all,

Just to reiterate my comments of the other day.  I did some poking
around and realized that there are calendar standards and vcard
standards out there.  

Gnus already has pretty nice integration with BBDB, but it doesn't
parse vcard information.  Now before anyone says that vcards are
silly, you should look at their specification
(http://www.imc.org/pdi/) - I don't think its necessarily a bad idea
to encode all the information that I give in my sig below so that it
can be automatically sucked into someones BBDB if they are so
inclined.  

There is also an accepted Vcalendar standard (again at
http://www.imc.org/pdi/) that allows people to
send meeting information in a standard form.  It might be very nice
to do this - not only would a lot of gnus-users stuck in corporate
environments be able to ditch Outlook, but it may also help propogate
these useful ways of marking up our emails.  The trend is towards more
information content in messages - if there are a few standard
templates we can parse like vcard and vcalendar then so much the
better.

Why do all this in gnus, a news and mail program?  Becuase now adays,
the majority of meetings get scheduled by email, and the majority of
contacts get made that way as well.  It makes sense to integrate the
Personl Information Manager and the mail reader as much as possible -
ythe email client is the glue that holds everything together.  Gnus
can do it - it understands attachements.  There is already a vcard
parser (but no way to dump it into BBDB yet), and I'm sure its not too
difficult to write a vcalendar parser.  So no, I'd not say gnus is
"feature-complete" yet.  There are lots of wonderful things going on
out there that aren't being tapped into yet.

Anyways, just some thoughts.  I may start poking into these things,
but I'm writing my dissertation so I don't have a lot of time.  I'm
also not very lisp-litterate.  

Cheers,  Jody

-- 
Jody Klymak                         APL/School of Oceanography,
Doctoral Candidate                  University of Washington
mailto:jklymak@apl.washington.edu   (206)-685-9080
http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/grads/jklymak/