Re: Balsa support to read and write OE mailboxes ( Want to implement it )

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

On 02/26/2003, Norman Jonas wrote:
> Hello Balsa development team,
> 
> I regularly use Linux as well as Windows. So to have a reliable mail 
> system that is able to use the same mailbox in Balsa ( which I prefer 
> on Linux ) as well as in Outlook Express ( which probably won't 
> support any other format too soon ) it is necessary to get Balsa to 
> be able to read and write the Outlook format of mail boxes ( AFAIK I 
> found some libs and code how to do this already ). Based on the balsa 
> website and the messages in the mailing list I am pretty sure that 
> there is no plan to implement this so that I will do it myself. 
> However, before I start this ( and before I take a deeper look into 
> the balsa code ) I would like to ask the Balsa developers ( and 
> others reading the list ) for status information on which thoughts 
> have been around concerning this topic.
> 
> A first plan of mine is to introduce a common API to balsa to access 
> different mailbox types ( threw different libs ), so that it will be 
> easier to write a library to access a OE mailbox.

This is my understanding of what's needed:

Balsa accesses all mailboxes through the LibBalsaMailbox api, so the 
first thing you need to do is just (!) create a new subclass 
(presumably of LibBalsaMailboxLocal) and implement the reqired methods.

Balsa scans the ~/mail/ directory tree and creates a mailbox for any 
file or subdirectory that it recognizes, using 
libbalsa_mailbox_type_from_path, so if you want OE mailboxes to be 
found in this process, you'd also need to add to this function.

The other way Balsa finds out about mailboxes is through the `File => 
New' submenu, and to add a `Local OE mailbox...' item, you'd need to 
create a corresponding callback (mailbox_conf_add_oe_cb ?), presumably 
much like the current mailbox_conf_add_{maildir,mbos,mh}_cb. If you 
followed this route (and I assume it's likely that your OE mailboxes 
aren't somewhere convenient, like in the ~/mail/ tree), you wouldn't 
need to mess with libbalsa_mailbox_type_from_path.

Good fortune!

Peter