Re: IMAP revisited

[Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>]

>>>>> Steinar Bang writes:

  SB> If nobody's working on it, I see no option except to start
  SB> investigating how to write one (todays snow means that the
  SB> motorcycle season is definitely *over*...).

I've been working on something very simple lately.  A friend has
written a Perl module NNML which looks like an NNTP server and
reads/writes an nnml like directory structure (hence the name).  This
Perl module has been extended with a number of commands XACCEPT,
XDATE, XDELETE and XDELETEGROUP.  I have extended the nntp backend to
include mail-like backend functions using these additional commands.
For example, if you type `B c', Gnus uses two backend functions, one
to extract the article from the source group, the second to insert it
into the target group (the latter is called *-request-accept-article).
I wrote the insertion function which just sends XACCEPT to the server.
As another example, expiring articles uses XDATE to extract the date
from an article then uses the normal Gnus mechanisms to decide whether
or not the article should be deleted.

The backend now finally works (I'm using it right now) but is still
rather slow for some actions.

Please note that this is no fancy stuff: the normal Gnus mechanisms
are used to maintain marks and so on.

I think it will be quite useful for sharing mail between home and
office: set up an NNML server at both ends, tell the home server to
suck everything from the office server, then read the mail at home.
But this means I see some mails twice (because of the marks).

kai
-- 
I wonder why nobody don't like me,
or is it de fact dat I'm ugly? -- Harry Belafonte