[Dovecot] Feature request - Reduced View

Bob Gustafson bobgus at rcn.com
Thu Aug 10 19:01:10 EEST 2006


On second thought, the duplicated messages to a second username has some
flaws.

1) If I read a message on my Reduced View MUA, the read flag is set on
the message in the second username directory, but not on the primary
directory. The same goes for messages I delete. I will eventually have
to do double work on all my messages.

2) There may be some problems with conflicting message UIDs between the
same message in two username spaces.

3) If I send a 'reply' to a message from my second username, I can fake
the return address as the primary username, but can I direct the 'sent'
copy to my 'sent' folder on the primary username.

Having two usernames increases the complexity.

I think server involvement is necessary. Maybe Timo's mention of virtual
folders is the correct direction.

Bob G

 On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 09:52 -0500, Bob Gustafson wrote:
> I was looking at sylpheed last night, but then I began to think more
> about the basic problem. There are two characteristics:
> 
> 1) The sliding window or Reduced View is only for one viewer. I use
> several mail viewers (MUA) in the course of a day.
> 
> 2) I don't ever want to download headers for all my mail to the Reduced
> View MUA. However, on other viewers, I do want to see all my mail.
> (Depends on the power of the underlying viewer machine. Pocket sized arm
> device is different from dual Xeon 3GB)
> 
> These requirements seem to indicate that some involvement is necessary
> on the server side. I have downloaded the IMAP protocol document
> (66pages) and have printed out 8 pages (index +) to see what IMAP gives
> me on this project.
> 
> -------
> 
> However, I do really like your cron job idea. It could be invoked just
> after each fetchmail from my ISP. Maybe hacking fetchmail to duplicate
> new mail into a second username. Then run cron to delete older mail from
> this second username. Point Reduced View MUA to this second username.
> 
> Need to encourage the MUA to toss headers that are old too.
> 
> Goes along with KISS principle.
> 
> Bob G
> 
> On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 10:24 +0200, Jakob Hirsch wrote:
> > Quoting Bob Gustafson:
> > 
> > > Something like a sliding window that would show messages younger than a
> > > week old (configurable slider horizon).
> > 
> > As other people already said, this is really a MUA function.
> > 
> > But it's also easy to do this on the server side, if you are using
> > Maildir. Just create a cron job which regularly moves old mail into a
> > subfolder.


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