Re: nnimap-split-download-body feature request

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, jas@extundo.com wrote:
>
>> It is not difficult to find out if a message is "too large", but the
>> problem is: what should nnimap do if the message is too large?
>> Throw an error?  Return no data?  Query the user?  Return dummy data
>> (that will stick around in the agent and cached forever)?  I fear a
>> backend interface change would be request to properly support
>> this...
>
> Nah, just fetch the headers.  I think that's all you can reasonably
> expect as a Gnus user.  Maybe fake the body with "BODY TOO LARGE" or
> something like that, or add a header, but I personally think that
> retrieving just the headers in such a case is a perfectly good
> solution.

The asynchronous prefetch, agent, cache (and possibly more things)
would cache this incomplete article.  How would they know the message
was incomplete?  After requesting a re-fetch of the entire article,
all those cached copies will need to be purged.  Sounds like work.

> This reminds me: is it possible to alter a message while splitting?

With nnimap, currently the answer is no.  It doesn't upload articles
to the server during splitting, it just use the COPY command.