Re: feature requests: edit message, pipe to ext. program

[Peter Bloomfield <peterbloomfield bellsouth net>]

Hi Ray!

On 04/30/2005 01:36:24 AM, Ray Morris wrote:
> There are a couple of features I'd really like to have which I  
> might add myself if you were just a bit stronger in C and Gnome  
> programming.  (I'm a Perl CGI programmer.)  Not that I expect  
> that there's anybody out there just looking for a new feature  
> idea to add, but if either of these sounds very useful to  
> anyone ...
>
> The most useful of the two would be to be able to edit messages  
> in the Inbox or other folders in order to add a note to them,  
> much like you can do in the Draftbox folder.  For example my  
> customers' order forms arrive via email. It would be quite  
> handy to be able to open the message in an edit window like you  
> can in Draftbox and add a little note saying "do not process  
> until Friday" or whatever.

Editing content makes me uncomfortable--it destroys a signature,  
for instance, so you lose any authentication.  How about the  
ability to add a note to a message?  It could be shown in the  
header box, much the way signature info is shown currently.  A  
note might be editable, or they could just accumulate, if you  
wanted to document progress in handling.

Annotation appears to be fairly easy to add to local mailboxes;  
some IMAP servers support the ANNOTATE extension, which is  
designed for this use, but some don't--they'd be more of a  
problem.

> Less generally useful, but maybe quite handy for some people,  
> would be to add a "pipe to" menu option to pipe an email to an  
> external program, similar to *indow's "Send To" menu for files.  
> I'm thinking of right clicking on an incoming email and  
> selecting "Pipe To - process_order.pl". The UI for this could  
> be simplified by doing what *indows does, having a "pipe_to"  
> directory and anything in that directory shows up as a "pipe  
> to" option. Simply symlinking process_order.pl into that  
> directory would add it as an option to Balsa.

As Pawel noted, the latest Balsa has the option to pipe the  
current message through an arbitrary command (though as yet only  
on the Message menu, not the right-click popup).  If you had  
multiple messages selected, would you expect all of them to be  
processed?

Best,

Peter