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Re: [Nmh-workers] mime-aware filtering?

2012-06-25 18:04:00
Paul Vixie writes:
On 6/25/2012 10:43 PM, Tethys wrote:
Ken Hornstein writes:

A possible way to solve the access to MIME parts problem
might be to store the parts as messageNumber.partNumber*
Creation of these parts would be optional, and eat space,
but it would make indexing/grepping easy.
You know ... given that & Norm's comments, that actually might work.
Thoughts? 

i'm opposed. what should be in the file system is what SMTP received and
handed to /var/mail or whatever.

My only thought is that MIME is more than just the linear list of
attachments that many seem to believe, and we need to come up with
a naming convention capable of representing that. And even then,
deciding what to store as content for a given part isn't necessarily
straightforward. For example, if you have a multipart/alternative
part, how do you represent that in the filesystem? We've briefly
touched on some of this before:

    http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2012-02/msg00088.html

But whatever we do, it needs careful thought to cover the edge cases
that are increasingly becoming the common case in mail I'm being sent.

thus my proposal which is to provide shell level commands that can
expose the message structure (as "msg.part{.subpart ...}") and something
like mhpath that will make you a /var/tmp file from the specified
part/subpart without any encoding, and then update the rest of the
command set to be able to accept a msg.part{.subpart ...} specifier
wherever it makes sense. as in, rmm would not make sense, but show would
make sense.

mhparts as the structure-exposer and mhpart as the tmp-file-maker would
be fine. or someone else will have a better idea. mhpart (or whatever)
would need a -clean option to get rid of the /var/tmp files it has made
for you in this session.

but i do not think we should pollute the Mail subdirectory hierarchy
with permanent copies of parts.

paul

This goes back to the project that I want to do when time permits and
someone makes m_scan into something that I can hack without fear of
breaking old VAX stuff.

I'd like a "show parts" option to scan, and the ability to do show msg.part,
next -part, and prev -part.  In other words, the option to work on messages
as a whole or on the parts individually.

I don't support polluting the Mail subdirectory.  I use a separate program
for indexing which I'm presently slowly rewriting as real work calls but
will re-release when done.

Jon

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