Re: [Evolution] Imap & Attachments

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 08:46, guenther wrote:
> > I use Evolution (1.4) to view emails from an imap server. I leave the
> > emails on the server. Unfortunately, Evolution downloads every time the
> > whole email inclusive the attachement. This is really annoying when I
> > use my slow modem line at home. I only want to view the email body and
> > download the attachment later if I want so. I used the email client
> > Mulberry and there it was no problem. Is it possible to tell Evolution
> > to download only the body message? Any hints welcome.
>
> AFAIK there is currently no way of not downloading attachments. However,
> as the IMAP code is planned to be rewritten for 1.6, maybe this will
> make it in the new code as an option?
>
> Jeff, what do you think?

this feature is actually already implemented, however what is probably
happening is that the attachment parts are not tagged with an
appropriate Content-Type an so evo says "I have no idea what mime-type
this part is, so I better sniff it" and so in order to do that it has to
download the particular attachment. This should only be happening if the
Content-Type is application/octet-stream tho.

anyways, for 1.6 we have some ideas on how to improve this. IMAP allows
us to only download a substream of the mime part, and so we plan on
doing this when we have to sniff (like maybe the first 1K or maybe less
- we could probably get away with just the first 100-200 bytes, so maybe
we'll only grab that much?)

the problem with this...is that with all the imap (and pop3 and smtp,
etc) server brokeness we've encountered, I'm a bit worried this will
cause people problems... *sigh*

my guess is that we'll implement it and if people report that their imap
servers suck (like they did with POP3 servers for the 1.4 release),
we'll just add a checkbox or something to work around the server
brokeness.

> To your issue: My observations are totally different, using IMAP too. I
> just checked it with a 5 MByte attachment:
>
> When viewing the mail the first time, the attachment is loaded. But the
> mail *and* the attachment are stored in a cache, so that I do not have
> to wait every time I read this mail.

*nod*

since this is the case for everyone (I should imagine, at least) - I
suspected what he meant was that each time he opens a new message (which
has not been looked at before), it always downloads the attachment(s) in
order to sniff them.

I could be wrong tho...

> This caching even survives closing Evolution for me.
>
>
> Does your IMAP server generate new UIDL id's for every new session at
> any chance? :-/

this could also be a problem... :-)

based on a bug report from one of the Sun Evo hackers I got last night,
I am suspecting that his server does this.

Jeff

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