Re: [Evolution] email as alarm type

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2001-11-20 at 14:04, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> You do not really need to use the message composer to send an email
> (specially, since you want emails to be delivered independently of
> whether you are running evolution or not).
>
> The only advantage of using the composer is that the message could be
> archived in your `Sent' folder.  But reminders for alarms are not really
> like messages you typed to mail yourself, so the value of keeping a copy
> in the Sent folder is diminished.
>
> On the other hand, using plain sendmail to fire off a message would
> enable this scenario to work, and it also enables a lot of
> functionality, for example you can send an SMS message or a page to your
> cell phone to remind you of an important appointment.

It is not that trivial.

iCalendar allows you to specify attachments that should be sent with
email alarms.  I really don't want to construct a MIME message by hand. 
And it doesn't make sense to do it, anyways, since the message composer
already knows how to do that for us and with a friendly GUI.

Also, you may not even have sendmail on your machine.  Sending the mail
through the message composer means that email alarms will work as long
as the user has Evolution configured right.

You could get your paging thing by using a procedure alarm and setting
the program to run "mail miguel cellphone com -s 'Whoopee' <
/dev/null".  Okay, you would have to hack Evolution not to ask you
before running a procedure alarm, but that is beside the point.

The purpose of using the message composer is to present a familiar GUI
for setting up a mail message, instead of having a few ugly text fields
in a custom dialog box for the calendar.

Why do we need to modify the composer?  Because the calendar needs to be
able to retrieve the message parts separately, namely recipients,
subject, body, and attachments.  The composer currently only allows you
to specify pre-set values for these fields and to send the mail --- it
cannot act as a data entry box from which we get values back.

So, we only need the composer for data entry purposes.  For actually
sending the mail we could use Camel directly (*shudder*), or actually
use the composer in its present form, which is what the iTIP code in the
calendar does.

>       * Does not need Evolution running.

This gets about as fuzzy as "Outlook does not need Internet Explorer
running".  It just needs to launch a few components that come from the
other beast.

  Federico