Re: Thoughts on the future direction of OfflineIMAP

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 05:45:02PM -0700, Akkana Peck wrote:
> like syncing multiple IMAP servers, or GUI work, sound cool in theory
> but I'll never use them so it would be hard to get motivated.

I completely understand that and it makes a lot of sense.  I work the exact
same way.  I added the multiple IMAP server feature because I wanted to use
KMail and that was the easiest way I could think of to do it.  It turned out
I hate KMail's guts, but the feature stuck :-)

> (1) The way messages keep getting stuck in new/ even after I've marked
> them as no longer new, so mutt forever thinks that folder has new
> messages in it until I fiddle with it by hand.  This seems to happen
> when something's been New for several cycles before get gets marked as
> read.  Maybe it's a mutt/maildir bug.  I waste a lot of time chasing it.

I've seen this one before and have made various tweaks to OfflineIMAP to try
to fix it.  The mutt people have done the same.  Can you verify you're
running the latest mutt?

> (2) A better way of syncing folders that get UID validity problems,
> which happens all the time.  Removing the whole folder uses up a lot
> of bandwidth and I keep hoping I can find a more efficient way.

Yup.  There are ways to make a guess, which I haven't bothered to implement,
but I would accept a well-written patch

> (3) More UI updates: I sent in that patch to do SummaryUI, but
> I'm going to keep tweaking on that here and there.

Yeah, I got that but I didn't quite like the way you did it -- no offense,
it's just not the "OfflineIMAP way".  What you can do, though, is subclass
UIBase (see the TTY or Noninteractive modules for examples on how this is
done).  You then just override the methods you care about (rather than
parsing through the _msg outputs), and handle things that way.

But feel free to keep sending them in.

> (4) Tons of IMAP errors -- I never get through a full run without some
> IMAP errors, but I'm hoping your rewrite magically fixes that without
> my having to do any work. :-)  Still, I might be able to pitch in

Ahh, I perceive another programmer as lazy as myself.  Welcome.  And you get
banished from the club if you fix somebody else's bug :-)

> And here's a bigger one, a feature: mbox format rather than maildir. 
> I don't know how much I care, I don't know how hard it would be,

The answer for me has always been "not at all" and "too hard" :-)
However, I've stated before that I'd accept a patch.

> but mutt really doesn't do maildir all that well compared to mbox
> (there's the problem with new messages not getting marked properly,
> and there's the problem that it can't tell which folders you've visited
> recently, so any folder with a new message is considered new forever
> even if you just looked at it; also it generally seems quite a bit
> slower), so now and then I wonder whether it might be easier to try
> to write mbox support for offlineimap than to try to solve the
> problems associated with maildir and mutt.

I fixed all that with apt-get update; apt-get install mutt :-)

What version of mutt do you have?

-- John