On Thu October 28 2004 16:38, Keith Moore wrote:
2. For archived-at to be useful by email clients generally requires
one or two of the following, in addition to the obvious client
support for the protocol and server support for the message format:
- mail archives that support IMAP access (or possibly NNTP)
- a specification for making collections of mail messages available
via HTTP (maybe WebDav) and/or FTP
- mail archives that follow the aforementioned specification
I don't think that the second item (http/ftp) is going to be
generally useful for email clients. Perhaps for combined
MUA/browsers, but at most there seems to be only a loose
connection between the browsers and MUA portions of those
(see below re. Mozilla).
I believe a great deal more is needed. I've mentioned lack of
URI support in MUAs and limited support of the most useful
URIs (imap) in browsers. Some details:
I sent several imap URIs to myself in the body of a text message
and opened the message in several MUAs. Only one
(Mozilla 1.7.3) recognized the URIs as imap URIs, and it
does nothing itself with imap URIs. The URIs could be
opened in the companion (Mozilla) browser by right-clicking
on the URI in the MUA and making a selection. However the
Mozilla broswer just sits there dumb when handed an imap
URI -- no result, no dialog, just a "Done" status line. Two
MUAs tested (Kmail and Sylpheed) misinterpreted the URIs
as if they were mailto URIs, which is pointless and useless.
One MUA simply displayed the URIs as text (not unreasonable);
that was Ximian Evolution.
The Opera browser appears not to support the imap scheme
in URIs; it pops up an error message complaining about an
unrecognized "address".
The Konqueror browser, as mentioned in February, does seem
to have limited imap URI support. It could handle the (pasted)
URIs, and would display folders and list folder contets. However
the messages were shown with a "type" of "Unknown". Right-
clicking allowed selecting an application to handle the message;
handling consists of copying the message to a local temporary
file, invoking the application with an attempt to open the
temporary file, then deleting the temporary file when the
selected application terminates. None of the usual MUA
applications seemed to work with Konqueror (Pine, Kmail,
etc., however simple text editors (e.g. gvim) seemed to work);
Konqueror had already deleted the temporary file by the time
the MUAs had started up, resulting in a "file not found"
error dialog. That's not terribly useful.
The best that seems to be possible at the moment is the
following kludge: Copy the URI text, open a Konqueror
browser window, paste the URI there, edit out any
message uid (remember, Konqueror doesn't handle the
content), memorizing that uid for future use, supply any
password that may be required, select the appropriate
message from the folder listing (via the memorized uid),
right-click, select a text editor to handle the message,
save a copy of the message somewhere from the text
editor, quit the editor, open the saved copy of the
message in an MUA to reply or whatever.
There certainly seems to be a great deal that would have to
be done beyond merely making archives available via IMAP
to make access to archived massages readily available
in native message form to MUAs via imap URIs.