Re: Balsa support to read and write OE mailboxes ( Want to implement it )

["Norman Jonas" <normanjonas arcor de>]

Wow, thanks for your reply. This helps a lot and sounds like being
implemented easily.

I will ask the author of a Outlook access lib for his permission to use that
code / lib for this task and I hope to submit a patch as soon as possible.

Norman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Bloomfield" <PeterBloomfield@bellsouth.net>
To: <balsa-list@gnome.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 5:07 PM
Subject: Re: Balsa support to read and write OE mailboxes ( Want to
implement it )


> On 02/26/2003, Norman Jonas wrote:
> > Hello Balsa development team,
> >
> > I regularly use Linux as well as Windows. So to have a reliable mail
> > system that is able to use the same mailbox in Balsa ( which I prefer
> > on Linux ) as well as in Outlook Express ( which probably won't
> > support any other format too soon ) it is necessary to get Balsa to
> > be able to read and write the Outlook format of mail boxes ( AFAIK I
> > found some libs and code how to do this already ). Based on the balsa
> > website and the messages in the mailing list I am pretty sure that
> > there is no plan to implement this so that I will do it myself.
> > However, before I start this ( and before I take a deeper look into
> > the balsa code ) I would like to ask the Balsa developers ( and
> > others reading the list ) for status information on which thoughts
> > have been around concerning this topic.
> >
> > A first plan of mine is to introduce a common API to balsa to access
> > different mailbox types ( threw different libs ), so that it will be
> > easier to write a library to access a OE mailbox.
>
> This is my understanding of what's needed:
>
> Balsa accesses all mailboxes through the LibBalsaMailbox api, so the
> first thing you need to do is just (!) create a new subclass
> (presumably of LibBalsaMailboxLocal) and implement the reqired methods.
>
> Balsa scans the ~/mail/ directory tree and creates a mailbox for any
> file or subdirectory that it recognizes, using
> libbalsa_mailbox_type_from_path, so if you want OE mailboxes to be
> found in this process, you'd also need to add to this function.
>
> The other way Balsa finds out about mailboxes is through the `File =>
> New' submenu, and to add a `Local OE mailbox...' item, you'd need to
> create a corresponding callback (mailbox_conf_add_oe_cb ?), presumably
> much like the current mailbox_conf_add_{maildir,mbos,mh}_cb. If you
> followed this route (and I assume it's likely that your OE mailboxes
> aren't somewhere convenient, like in the ~/mail/ tree), you wouldn't
> need to mess with libbalsa_mailbox_type_from_path.
>
> Good fortune!
>
> Peter