Re: mail regex

[Alain Magloire]

> Bon matin!

8-)

> 
> Quoting Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden>, who wrote:
> > Actually, I am thinking about a more general approach. Sometimes it
> > is necessary to select letters on the contents of an arbitrary
> > header.  So, I'd extend the search syntax to something like
> > 
> >     Received:/.*mirddin.*/
> > 
> > meaning select all the letters with the given regexp in Received: header.
> > If the "header:" portion is omitted, it defaults to Subject:.
> > Any comments?
> 
> Have you looked at Mutt's pattern's? They do this, here's an excerpt from
> the docs:
> 
>   4.2.  Patterns
> 
>   Many of Mutt's commands allow you to specify a pattern to match
>   (limit, tag-pattern, delete-pattern, etc.).  There are several ways to
>   select messages:

I certainly like the idea of extending the search to other parts of messages,
like envelope, attribute, headers and body.  But Mutt's syntax does not go
well with mailx way of doing things.

Mailx is archaic i.e. it's not a `visual' mail browser and there is
a danger in extending too much it's capabilities.  If we want a visual
(visual here includes the use of ncurses) mail browser, we should write one
cleanly and it should be a task made `easy' by the support provided
from the library.  Or simply stick with elm/mutt/pine/balsa etc ...

There is an effort call `hydrant', wich is yet another mail browser, that
Jeff wanted to start.  The interesting thing about hydrant is that it
will rely on mailutils/mailbox to provide much of the functionnality.
But some obvious pieces from mailutils/mailbox are missing:

- good imap support
- Caching mailbox: mailboxes are use online, we need to be able
  to do disconnected mode, and let the library handle the caching/synch.
  For imap there is an rfc that discribe the sync algorithm.
  For pop3, there is a popular algorith also.
- virtual mailbox
- good folder support
- mailcap/mime.types support
- etc ..

--
alain