Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen <bts@evenmere.org>]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On Wed 2017-10-25 18:03:01 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
>> That's inspiring!  Now there's a demo of nmweb at
>>
>> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/
>
> this is very nice, Brian.

Thanks!  The part I'm happiest about is the speed: this is as fast as I
remember gmail being.  The Secret Ingredient is HTTP chunked encoding,
accessed through web.py's generators, and careful page design---almost
every byte from the server is renderable as it arrives, and later bytes
never disrupt placement of earlier objects.

> Your URL highlighter seems a bit trigger-happy though:
>
>    https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/8760s7zr47.fsf%40zancas.localnet
>
> I don't think bremner was trying to link to http://index.cc !

As a wise soul once told me, use a library and then blame them.  This is
the Mozilla Bleach library, used for both sanitizing text/html parts and
for linkifying text/plain parts.  But since that supports filtering:
sure, this can only linkify things starting with 'http[s]://'

>> It's possible to get it to dump the whole mbox by clicking through the
>> obvious links; please consider exploring at
>> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/search/monkey instead.
>
> this is interesting because it shows me threads where some messages have
> monkey in them, but i can't tell which messages actually have the
> relevant search term.  Maybe it could highlight the found messages?

Very careful examination would have shown that the em-dashes between
author and subject were red for matches.  Now matches are in italics.

> Also, once i'm looking at one message, i don't see an easy way to go
> "next" in the thread.

Yup.  The thread object isn't accessible by then: it existed in the
scope of the search query, and is gone by the time we show the message.
get_replies isn't available.  So what's the alternative?
get_thread_id(), search for that thread id, identify this message *in*
that thread id, and then link to the next message with a "next" link?
While doing it, why not show the thread structure at the bottom of the
message, I guess.

With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
to let random notmuch users run it.  The worst they'll do is expose
their mailstore on tcp/8080.  Any interest in taking this into the
upstream contrib directory?

-Brian