Re: [Evolution-hackers] concept question

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Sat, 2004-01-10 at 00:18, 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?

since I'm not sure if you are asking about 1.4 vs future feature
requests, I'll try to answer in both contexts:

for 1.4: 

not possible

future: 

specially created folder how? what is special about it? uploading
evolution's filters.xml file to an imap folder is going to be 100%
useless afaict, since nothing but evolution knows how to use it.

if what you want is sieve support (ie. whereby evolution converts its
filters.xml file, converts it to the sieve syntax and uploads it via the
sieve protocol so that servers supporting sieve would do server-side
filtering), then my response would be "a huge pain the arse" :-)

however, it *is* in the plan... we went through a lot of discussion at
the beginning of the current development cycle (1.5) trying to flush out
how we were going to do this because the Exchange Connector code needs
to do something similar and we wanted them to be able to share a lot of
code.

This probably won't be implemented until at the very earliest 2.2

> 
> 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.

it'd be better to support sieve since it is already supported by at
least cyrus and is also accepted as a standard (afaik, or maybe it's
just a draft... either way it's more likely to become a standard than
this approach)

now I see where the whole "upload the filters.xml file to a special
folder" thing is coming from... the problem with this is that it feels
kludgy to do it this way. the way sieve does it is that I think it
listens on another port separate from IMAP that you upload [multiple]
scripts to as well as manage them.

> 
> My thougths are to have "Exchange-like" ability for offline filtering,
> and I think this would be the fastest and most simple approach.

it might be, but the right way to do it is via sieve.

> 
> 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.

it'd be great to have help implementing support in evo to be able to
manage server-side filtering rules. I'm just not sure how I would feel
about getting a patch to do it your way is all... if sieve wasn't
around, I'd be delighted but that's not the case... :-\

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com