Re: New mailbox interface and gmime messages

[Pawel Salek <pawsa theochem kth se>]

On 2003.02.26 21:34 Magick wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been slowly working on a new mailbox interface, using gmime as a 
> message-container.
> Currently it is still using libmutt, but it is pretty easy to switch 
> it for something else.
> 
> The patch is at:
> http://demands.xs4all.nl/~magick/libmailbox-4.patch.gz or
> http://demands.xs4all.nl/~magick/libmailbox-4.patch
> 
> I would really appreciate some/any feedback...

I spotted one mistake: UIDVALIDITY in case of IMAP determines "age" of 
UIDs and whether, eg, cached messages from previous session can be 
reused.

I am not yet sure how the changes you suggest fit in the whole picture. 
We plan to replace libmutt's imap code (and possibly entire libmutt, if 
we have enough work force) with our own code that is more bandwidth 
friendly (and if we manage to replace libmutt by gmime: more flexible).

I started coding the imap library but it is not ready for release yet. 
Current code is available at 
http://balsa.gnome.org/libimap-1.0.0.tar.gz (the number has nothing to 
do with the the completness of this code) under GPL. There is one or 
two half-working examples in test/ directory. In particular, browse-tui 
demonstrates primitive access to an imap server, listing folders, 
browsing the mailbox index in a bandwidth-friendly way. The crucial 
part is that the code fetches only headers for the visible messages: 
try using another approach on a message with several thousands messages.

This is partially related to another change we would like to implement 
soon: a GTkTreeModel interface for LibBalsaMailbox. Currently, 
introducing the changes described above would not be enough because 
displaying messages via GtkTreeStore would fetch all headers anyway. 
So, these two changes go really together - but can be implemented 
separately. I have a preleminary patch for this interface - sorting and 
threading parts are missing. Interested people can download the patch 
at http://balsa.gnome.org/balsaGtkTreeModel.diff.bz2 - be warned: it 
may even not apply cleanly to current cvs.

Pawel