Maildir support status

[Aviram Jenik <aviram beyondsecurity com>]

Hi,

I'm a KDE user that uses beagle for indexing Maildir info. I would like to 
share my experience so far, and what I had to do to get Maildir working in 
KDE.

Maildir support has been integrated in version 0.0.12, but has drastically 
improved in the current CVS version. This, in combination with the speed 
improvements (especially during beagled startup) makes indexing my entire 
maildir (over 10,000 mails) feasible.

Preparations:

1. Kmail sometimes adds custom headers to mail files. Specifically, the 
anti-virus wizard will add a custom header to the beginning of an email file. 
This makes beagle (gnomevfs, actually) misrecognize those mail files.
You can check it with gnomevfs-info. Make sure it returns 'message/rfc822' as 
the mime type. If not, use sed, or your favorite file-and-replace utility to 
remove the custom headers or to add a fictitious "Return-Path" line:
Return-Path: <nobody nowhere com>

To the beginning of the file. Don't forget to delete the beagle db and 
re-index.

2. KDE users should install nautilus (to get best's 'reveal in file manager' 
working), and make sure mail files are open with kmail by default (right 
click on the mail file and choose properties. You'll find it from there)

3. Kmail names mail folders as directories that start with a dot ('.'). Beagle 
skips those 'hidden' directory, so you have to manually add all mail folders:
$ beagle-config indexing AddRoot /home/user/Mail/.Folder.directory/Stuff/cur
(this is a bug/enhancement request: 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311755).

4. Maildir files are handled by the directory crawler, which means that 
'beagle-index-info' will show mail files as "Files" and not as "Mail". Don't 
worry if your "Mail" count stays at zero. 

5. Note that 'best' also searches maildir files as 'files' and not 'mail'. 
This is a bug (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310464).


The last remaining 'showstopper' for me, is the fact that best shows the file 
names (which looks like: "1115122924.6214.qBfSs:2,S, in folder cur") instead 
of the subject, from, to, and other interesting fields. This problem is 
mentioned here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310992 and makes 
searching fairly impractical for more than 3-4 results. You have to click on 
each result to see what it is :-(

Other than that, Maildir is handled quite nicely. Thanks for the great work!

Any comments/corrections/ideas are of course welcomed.

- Aviram