Re: Mail indexer

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 17:28 +0200, Nils Erik Svang� wrote:
> I user mozilla-thunderbird as my primary mailreader (I dont like the
> filtering in Evolution). I have played around with beagle (and browsed
> the Evolution indexer source). If I want to index my mail do I have to
> make a Thunderbird indexer or is it better to write a IMAP interface
> and index my mail directly on the server.
> This question applies to LICQ also, I use LICQ and Gaim parallel. LICQ
> handles ICQ much better than Gaim. Do I have to write a indexer for
> LICQ aswell. 

Writing a Thunderbird backend is the best way to go for this.  This
probably also applies for LICQ, but I don't know how its data is stored.

> What is the diffrence between indexer and filters?

What you call the "indexer" we call a "backend."  A backend is
essentially a data source.  For example, the file system is a data
source: all of the files in your home directory.  The Evolution mail
backend is a data source: it pulls structured data from your
~/.evolution directory and GConf.  The Gaim backend pulls data from
~/.gaim, and knows how to parse the Gaim buddy list and log files.

A filter, on the other hand, knows how to process a specific piece of
data, regardless of its data source.  So the HTML filter can process
HTML files on disk, HTML attachments in your mail, or the HTML logs from
Gaim.

For your two examples, you probably want to write backends and have
those use existing filters is possible.  For example, if you extract the
message data with the Thunderbird backend, the mail filter will process
it and extract info like From, To, Subject, etc.

Joe