From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Juri Linkov Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: RMAIL, MIME-related bug Date: 19 Oct 2003 23:59:22 +0300 Organization: JURTA Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+emacs-devel=quimby.gnus.org@gnu.org Message-ID: <874qy4vbg7.fsf@mail.jurta.org> References: <200310121947.h9CJlhKH006102@oak.pohoyda.family> NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1066620591 12220 80.91.224.253 (20 Oct 2003 03:29:51 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 03:29:51 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+emacs-devel=quimby.gnus.org@gnu.org Mon Oct 20 05:29:48 2003 Return-path: Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.224.244]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1ABQjs-0007ZH-00 for ; Mon, 20 Oct 2003 05:29:48 +0200 Original-Received: from monty-python.gnu.org ([199.232.76.173]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1ABQjs-0004rV-00 for ; Mon, 20 Oct 2003 05:29:48 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.24) id 1ABQj6-0002Lp-Fj for emacs-devel@quimby.gnus.org; Sun, 19 Oct 2003 23:29:00 -0400 Original-Received: from list by monty-python.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.24) id 1ABQio-0002Kk-J5 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 19 Oct 2003 23:28:42 -0400 Original-Received: from mail by monty-python.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.24) id 1ABQiI-0002Hj-LC for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 19 Oct 2003 23:28:41 -0400 Original-Received: from [64.246.52.232] (helo=ns5.tangramltd.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (TLSv1:DES-CBC3-SHA:168) (Exim 4.24) id 1ABQiI-0002He-6x for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 19 Oct 2003 23:28:10 -0400 Original-Received: from 80-235-32-99-dsl.mus.estpak.ee ([80.235.32.99] helo=mail.jurta.org) by ns5.tangramltd.com with esmtp (Exim 4.20) id 1ABQiF-0004ib-3s; Mon, 20 Oct 2003 06:28:07 +0300 Original-To: Stefan Monnier In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3.50 Original-Lines: 38 X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - ns5.tangramltd.com X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - gnu.org X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12] X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - jurta.org X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.2 Precedence: list List-Id: Emacs development discussions. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+emacs-devel=quimby.gnus.org@gnu.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:17251 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:17251 Stefan Monnier writes: > Why do people even consider doing any processing at that point? > The processing should be done for display and nothing else, because any > other option will make you lose information at some point and also forces > you to have code to re-create the original format, whereas the "display-side > processing" approach only needs to parse MIME but never needs to > re-construct it. I will not argue about the default mbox format (it's pretty obvious that messages should be preserved in their original transferred format). But I'll tell about functionality still missing in Emacs. 1. Often there is a need to grep the mail archive for some old message. This is impossible if message is encoded in base64/quoted-printable. 2. Sometimes there is a need to make a bookmark to the message to be able to quickly return to it later. Hopeless. Only one way to fetch old message is to start MUA and browse through dozens of folders and hundreds of messages in every folder. I see one solution to these problems - to export entire mbox to the file system, i.e. to save MIME parts to separate files, decode base64/quoted-printable regions, convert the charset from Content-Type line to Emacs encoding, add corresponding -*- coding: -*- line, and save fully decoded message to a separate file. Note that this don't contradict the decision to store messages in mbox in their undecoded form. The proposed solution duplicates the content of messages in the decoded form. Hard disks now so cheap that having two copies of the same message is not a problem. The decoded messages could also be used as a cache to make displaying messages faster, whereas undecoded messages will be available to resend forwards, where no original information should be lost. There should be some way to correlate between them, i.e. to find corresponding decoded message from undecoded one, and vice versa. -- http://www.jurta.org/emacs/