Re: Evolution and Procmail- can they work together?

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On 13 Aug 2001 21:22:35 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Am 13 Aug 2001 12:20:30 -0400 schrieb Jeffrey Stedfast:
> > On 13 Aug 2001 11:00:37 +0200, christophe barbé wrote:
> > > You are going to discover that even if evolution uses mbox (you can choose
> > > the format), procmail is not well supported.
> > > Evolution will not noticed new mails. Evolution will rescan each mailbox
> > > touched by procmail at each startup and this can take a long time.
> Yep, and often it fails to scan mboxes (even w/o procmail) :(

Evolution reads the summaries and if the mboxes haven't been touched
since Evolution last wrote the summary, then it doesn't bother
rescanning the mbox (why should it? this is the whole point of using
summaries).

> 
> > > Christophe
> > 
> > What you really want to do is filter into an mbox and have Evolution
> > import it. *Or*, you could tell evolution to use these filtered mbox
> > files as "spool"'s and use them that way.
> You are missing a major point: procmail can be applied as very
> sophisticated cascaded personal and system wide mail filter system. I
> personally consider procmail to be far superior to evolution's filter
> system. So why don't you adopt procmail instead of "reinventing the
> wheel" (== mail filtering)?

Because it's important to have a good integrated filtering solution
rather than a half-assed hacked up fork()/exec() of procmail. Not to
mention, can we really be able to expect the average computer user to
`man procmail` to write some simple filtering rules? No.

> 
> > The reason you can't just dump mail into Evolution's folders is because
> > it keeps a summary of them and if you append to the mbox without
> > updating the summary files, then they get out of sync.
> I know, but I am not sure whether I like this design. It's yet another,
> "compatible to nothing else" mail-archiving system.

There isn't a standard and we support damn near every format. You have a
better solution?

Jeff

> 
> > Not to mention
> > Evolution uses file locking, I'm not sure whether or not procmail does?
> man procmailrc and man procmail and you will see: Dotfile locking.
> 
> Sorry, if something above might sound harsh. Let me assure you it
> definitely is ment as such. Evolution for sure is a promissing approach,
> but IMHO, it still has a long way ahead, probably longer than Ximian's
> evolution folks might expect.
> 
> Ralf
> 
> 
> 
> 
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