Re: nnimap URLs? (Was: What now?)

[Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se>]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> They could be a good start towards an infrastructure for doing delayed
> loading of attachments in nnimap mail groups.  nnimap could replace
> the attachment MIME parts with an URL external body message part
> 	http://www.landfield.com/rfcs/rfc2017.html
> and when opening the part, the contents of the URL would be fetched
> and inserted inline (that is, if Simon hasn't already fixed this in a
> different way and I haven't been paying attention...:-) ).

I haven't, but I'm sort-of against the idea of modifying an article in
the backend. You'd never really now what the article actually looked
like in the long run...

Unless someone want to implement automatic external-body access-type
stuff in nnimap, I think we should have a go at a MIME-aware backend
interface instead. Here's quick idea:

Introduce a new backend function 'nnfoo-request-body' that return a
MIME structure of the article (the "BODY structure" in IMAP is quite
lisp-ish and would be general enough to work in Gnus).

Also introduce a new backend function `nnfoo-request-body-parts' which
take a list of MIME parts and return the corresponding body part.

The standard article stuff groks theese new functions and use them if
available, and only request the body parts that normally are
displayed.

OTOH external-body access-type would be quite simple, given that there
is a url-imap package.