Re: [Evolution-hackers] winmail.dat/TNEF streams

[Larry Ewing <lewing ximian com>]

On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 11:45 -0500, Not Zed wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 15:29, Randall Hand wrote:
> > I'm the maintainer of ytnef (http://ytnef.sourceforge.net).  I
> > released the ytnef C Library a few days ago, after alot of work and
> > testing.  
> > 
> > I was wondering if there's any plan to directly support TNEF streams
> > inside Evolution?  Right now we have to use procmail and filters and 
> 
> Larry Ewing had a bonobo component he was playing with at some point,
> but i'm not sure how far it got.
> 

It worked fine for attachments but didn't parse any of the more
interesting bits like contact information or meeting requests etc.  One
of the issues is that because it was based on GPL'd code not owned by
Ximian we couldn't link it into the mailer (since the connector is
proprietary) and bonobo oop component activation is too slow for inline
display in most cases.

> > such to do it, and that mangles signatures and such.  It would be nice
> > if evolution could directly do this.  I'm happy to work with the 
> 
> I'm not sure if you'd still be able to maintain signatures, depends I
> guess on how it would have to work.
> 
> > Evolution developers to implement this functionality, although I have
> > no experience with gtk/bonobo or any of this gnome programming stuff. 
> > Is this a plan for a later 1.4? Or 1.6/2.0?
> 
> It wouldn't go into 1.4.
> 
> As to how it would be done ... It depends on how it can be made to
> work.  If it possible to just take a tnef and form a valid MIME
> structure (it needn't be a mime stream, just the parsed in-memory
> representaiton) from it, then you dont even need to deal with gtk or
> bonobo.  If on the other hand, it needs its own display system too, then
> it would probably be best being a bonobo component, and Larry's stuff
> might be a starting point, and it can be done completely independently
> of our work.

It should be possible to fake a mime structure for the parts that ytnef
actually decodes, but the license issue is still out there.  Also in the
past it didn't look like there was a simple way to replace an attachment
with a multipart blob in mail display code, is that any simpler now? 
Finally, TNEF attachments are rare enough these days that I doubt we
have any resources to spare on improving support for them, but if
someone is interested in working on this I can point them in the right
direction.

--Larry