Re: Rough cut at a Gnus nnmail backend queryable/indexer

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hey,

On 4/23/07, JM Ibanez <jm orangeandbronze com> wrote:
> Since I use Gnus as my mail client, I've been hoping that Beagle index
> my mail correctly (instead of treating them as plain text files).

I'm not sure I totally understand.  Are things like attachments not
being indexed correctly?  If Beagle isn't recognizing them as email
messages, this would indicate a problem with the MIME detection.

Try running beagle-extract-content on one of the files, and see if its
MIME type is message/rfc822, and if metadata is extracted from the
message (like to, from, subject, etc.)

Another question to ask yourself is, how would you open these email
messages from a GUI client?  By default it will just try to open the
URI, so whatever application can handle opening message/rfc822 files
will do so.  Unfortunately, I think this is nothing on GNOME (but it
might be gedit).  On KDE this is KMail.  Ideally Gnus would be
installing a .desktop file which indicates that it knows how to handle
these URIs.

If Gnus can't handle the URIs (or filenames) for a given message on a
command-line, then it'll require special support from clients to open.

The backend you wrote looks fine, but it doesn't add a whole lot to
the indexable objects it creates.  Is there any way to find out
whether the client is Gnus from the mail filter, and then determine
its folder?  If so, this will save you a *lot* of code, and a separate
backend won't be necessary.

Joe