Re: IMAP, Google, and Yahoo Drivers

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 10:18 -0500, Adam T. Gautier wrote:
> I know there was some issue on actually having google in
> working order because of dashboard and license issues.  

The problem isn't the code so much as the terms of service for the
Google key.  I don't remember the exact issues, but basically we can't
ship a key with Beagle and so it's up to people to get their own keys
for their own personal use.  Very annoying.

> I am not sure if there is an existing way to get the google driver
> to work but I wrote a new tile based off of tomboy and after a few tweaks
> and issues now have it coming up in best.

I presume you mean beagle-search instead of best?  If so, you're right
in writing a new tile; we never created a "web search" tile when we
moved from best to beagle-search.

> On another note I looked into porting some generic IMAP code from python
> into beagle.  As Joe S. thought I ran into a problem with .net libraries
> superseded python libraries.  I will probably have to rewrite the code in
> C#.  

Right.  Although it might work, IronPython is a fairly new
implementation and I'm not willing to add a dependency on the python
class libraries for Beagle.

> Then to answer the next question of (paraphrasing), "How will the
> information from IMAP be displayed (generic URI and what not)?"  Is there
> a generic text viewer?  I see that there are some viewers for Contacts and
> such (used this yet). I think a generic text viewer would 1.) solve the
> issue of displaying information to a user that does not have an available
> local viewer (remote mail files). 

If you're looking for a generic text viewer, you could just say that the
MIME type is text/plain and OpenFromMime() will feed it to gedit or
whatever.

Displaying emails as text would be a pretty miserable user experience
though, in my opinion, especially if the mail contains MIME parts.  What
you'd probably want is to write a specialized mail viewer.  We suggested
that someone take on this task over a year ago now:

        http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2005-May/msg00065.html

> 2.) Provide a mechanism for fast prototyping of new and interesting 
> drivers (I have lots of database information that needs indexing).  I 
> would think that a simple viewer of Key:Value fields and a main text 
> body would prove to be very useful.

beagle-extract-content displays all the properties and text extracted
from a file when passed to the filters, and beagle-query --verbose does
a search against indexes and returns all the stored information.  These
two tools should provide you with what you need.

Thanks,
Joe