Re: Offline mail and group cooperation

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

grossjoh@lothlorien.cs.uni-dortmund.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> I guess that nnimap and Gnus Agent is still one of the major
> alternatives.  I remember that I tried it a long time ago and I was
> confused about which messages it wanted to download automatically.  I
> guess that we want to download all messages (regardless of marks) in
> selected groups.  Is this possible with the Agent?  

Right now the Agent is hard coded to never download articles marked as
read in Gnus.  I posted a (very lightly tested) patch to fix this long
time ago, but never committed it as it breaks backwards compatibility
(people that want the old behaviour had to add a `read' Agent
predicate to only download read articles, which was the old
behaviour).

What you describe is how most other disconnected clients work, so I
think it would be nice to support it, but I'm not sure how.  Is it
worth breaking backwards compatibility for this?  Perhaps adding a
`unread' Agent predicate which you'd need to add to get this behaviour
could work.

> The common groups could be handled via shared folders.  But I think
> we would want separated marks.  Does Cyrus allow us to say which
> marks should be per-user and which should be per-folder?  

Not fully fine grained, I think, but it may be enough.  Look at
setting ACLs on mailboxes, I remember being able to say whether a user
was permitted to set global flags.  ACLs could probably be used to
exclude students from mailboxes too.

> And then there is the thorny problem that nnimap/agent do not allow
> moving of messages from one group to another while offline, right?

Right.

> (And if we do IMAP, then I think I want to do my splitting using
> ifilter.  But that would have to be done on the server side, and how
> does ifilter on the server know that I've moved a message?)

Can't you split when you plug in?

Generally I think there are dragons in the IMAP and Agent interaction,
so other mechanisms are probably easier to get to work, but it would
be useful if you had time to try to get it to work.