[Sorry for reviving an old thread. I subscribed recently & sampling
old threads....]
On Sat, 08 Apr 2017 14:53:58 -0400 Ken Hornstein <kenh@pobox.com> wrote:
I know you know this already, Paul; I'm only repeating it for the
benefit of others. The Big Problem with a nmh IMAP backend is how to
map nmh message numbers (which are persistent, can have gaps) to IMAP
messages (which are either identified by a non-permament message number
which ranges from 1-N without gaps or by UID, which is permament).
AFAIK, Mailutils has not solved that problem. Maybe I'm wrong! If so,
I welcome a correction. But I don't think that's their goal. So
I think if you want something like nmh, but on IMAP folders, then
we have to do it.
What about storing sequence related info in a separate imap
folder in some fake messages? May be even as a MIME
attachments!
1. Basically map MH msg numbers to Mail-IDs + status in an
"index" email message. May be one msg per folder.
2. On any +folder access, this index email would have to be
reconciled with any new or deleted messages.
3. Initial connection and periodic checking would have to
similarly reconcile with new or deleted folders.
4. Most MH commands should require no change if messages are
cached locally like now. Basically all local state would
turn into cache and real state stored on the imap server.
5. An alternative would be to implement most of this in a
separate server & mount the "mailfs" it via fusefs. This is
somewhat analogous of plan9's upas. Such a server would
require no change in MH proper (or may be only for
delivery).
There are a number of benefits of doing this but an MH specific
"storage" API would've to be defined first.
I am sure someone else must have thought of this idea before?
Can you see any obvious problems? Apart from new work + rework
cost. One concern is whether typical MH use patterns are
expensive (and hence slow) over IMAP.
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