Re: [Evolution-hackers] concept question

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Sat, 2004-01-10 at 00:18 -0500, Ray Auge wrote:
> Hello All you wonderful hackers,
> 
> Happy new Year!
> 
> I have a two part question, food for thought so to speak.
> 
> part 1) 
> 	Suppose we have an IMAP account configured. How difficult would it be
> to add a button to the filters dialog that would allow one to push the
> filters file (I believe it's an XML file) onto an IMAP server in, for
> example, a specialially designated IMAP folder that is created during
> the process?

The filters dialogue has no concept of attached account.  So this
wouldn't be very easy.

We were talking earlier about supporting server-side rules, sieve and
exchange stuff (and groupwise), and in that case it would have an
attached 'server', but this change isn't trivial either.

> part 2)
> 	How modular is the code that performs the filtering. Is it a self
> contained lib? Could it easily made available to other projects, say to
> be added as a plugin to courier/cyrus-imap.

I don't think this would be appropriate.  It would be better to support
server-side rules properly and then attach seive rules or procmail etc,
depending on the server.

> My thougths are to have "Exchange-like" ability for offline filtering,
> and I think this would be the fastest and most simple approach.
> 
> This is something that in the next few months I would really like the
> oppertunity to investigate. I believe it would add a special touch to
> the evolution offerings. I would more or less like to know if it is a
> sound proposition.

I can't remember how much of the server-side rule implmeentation was
discussed publically at the time, but we did start planning for it,
about 6 months ago but it got shelved for this release.  And that would
cover most of what you're after (and since we'd presumably have some
plugin/type mechanism, you could extend it to support any type of filter
backend).

 Michael