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



On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 18:04 -0400, Randall Hand wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 13:57, Larry Ewing wrote: 
> > 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.
> The ytnef C Library is GPL, but you should be able to dynamically link
> to it with no problems.
> 

As Ettore mentioned in his reply we can't link directly, the library
would either need to be at least as free as the LGPL or have a special
exception for linking against connector.  I had the possibly erroneous
impression that ytnef was based on another previous tnef decoder, is so
any sort or relicensing would be difficult I imagine.

> > 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.
> The ytnef application actually regenerates the MIME Portions. 
> Everything internal to the email can be expressed as basic attachments
> (files, contact cards, meeting requests, etc).  There's alot of other
> information in there too, but most of it's redundant stuff like
> correlation keys and sender addresses and stuff.  The library actually
> just fills a giant structure with all the information, and exports a
> few functions to easily find the desired MAPI attributes.  It's up to
> the calling app to decide what to do with the information.

That makes sense, thanks for the description.  The easiest way to make
the mailer deal with this would be take an appraoch similar to the
application and convert the attributes into fake mime parts containing
constructed ical vcard and file attachments.  Dan might have some
thoughts on this because he has worked on similar issue for Ximian
Connector.

> As for it being rare, I still see hundreds of these. 

Admittedly I'm probably not the best example of someone trying to
integrate into a Windows/Exchange environment, but I've only seen one in
the last two years or so and I used to see a lot more so my impression
was that they were not widespread any longer.  I could easily be wrong.

--Larry




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