[Evolution-hackers] problems integrating evolution with tomboy

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Hi,

So I've encountered the following issues when trying to support
copy/paste and drag 'n drop linking of mails to Tomboy notes... 

Inside a Tomboy note I would like to show the subject, an icon
representing its replied-to status, and any flags or labels.  Clicking a
linked mail should open it using the running evolution instance.  

Currently I can only support showing the subject and opening, and those
are done only with gross hacks.  To support the rest I would have to
parse camel summaries directly.

These are the main problems I see:

* For email drops, there is no mapping between the x-uid-list uris and
the uris that the mail component can open on the command line.  So I
have to read and parse evo's gconf email account info, and manually map
the x-uid-list uris to accounts that I find, using mail backend-specific
uri matching.

* There is no status blob passed in drops, so I must parse the mime
message directly to get the summary info (subject, sender, date, etc),
and support mbox format parsing when multiple messages are dropped.  And
this still doesn't allow me to get at information like whether the
message has been responded-to or flagged as important.

* No way to reference attachments.  They are just copied to a temp file.
Not able to show an attachment in the mail message context I've seen it
(no x-uid-list for attachments).

* No way to be notified of changes to linked mails, such as deletion,
moving, replying, or flagging the existing email.


Also, it seems that none of the other components besides the mailer
support command line URI schemes (via the handleURI component call), so
there is no easy way for me to pop up the evolution dialogs for editing
a task, a contact, or a calendar item.  Or to have these objects
displayed inside their respective components in a running evolution.

-Alex