[Evolution] How to import tasks/appts non-interactively?

["Alan Millar" <alan millar lpcorp com>]

As has been mentioned before, one really useful feature in MS Outlook is
the ability to drag an e-mail to a calendar or tasks folder and have it
be changed into one of those items.  Generally, the subject becomes the
title of the item and the email body becomes the notes.

I need that feature for myself, and I'm trying to figure out how I can
do it.  I'm not a developer, so I'm not up to modifying/patching Evo. 
But I can write Perl scripts, so I'm working on a strategy for an
external hack.

Here's the idea I came up with so far.  Assume one main Tasks folder and
one main Calendar folder.  Create two maildir folders for messages to
transform, such as "appts-from-email" and "tasks-from-email".  Drag any
emails you want into those folders.  Run my proposed script that reads
the messages and converts them into vCal/iCal files (perhaps from a rule
if possible or perhaps from cron every few minutes), and then import
those into the appropriate Evolution folders.  For appointments, set
them for the current hour, and then let the user move them to the
appropriate day/time.

In Perl, I can handle (and have written) the part of reading the maildir
folder and transforming the messages into iCal format (extract only the
plain/text body, etc).  Here's where I am stuck: how do I get the iCal
data into Evolution?

I could attempt to write directly to the Calendar and Tasks .ics files
behind Evo's back, but I'm not going to even attempt that due to file
sync issues. 

I can do File-Import by hand for each one; it works but doesn't
accomplish the drag-and-drop goal.  

I can create new mail messages in a third folder with MIME text/calendar
attachments.  This is clean, but still requires opening each message and
hitting the "OK" button on the attachment.  This is the best method I
have come up with so far, but I want to figure out how to bypass hitting
OK on each one.  Plus I still have to delete each email after hitting
OK.

I could write directly to a new .ics file (an "Incoming Tasks" and
"Incoming Appts" native Evo folder).  But you'd still have to drag the
items into your main Tasks and Calendar folders from there, and still
possibly have sync issues on the new folders between multiple runs of
the script.

I'd really like to just be able to run Evo with a command line option to
import a .ics file into the default folder for that type, but I can't
seem to find out if or how I can do that.  I know I can run Evo with a
command-line URI, which can at least open a folder if you can discover
the magic URI, but I can't find any references to importing or what
possible URI's exist.

Any ideas or suggestions?  Thanks

- Alan

-- 
Alan Millar                  Email: Alan Millar LPCorp com
System Administrator         Voice: 503-821-5450
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