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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: Archiving messages from KMail
From:       Neil Williams <linux () codehelp ! co ! uk>
Date:       2003-09-12 0:07:28
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On Friday 12 Sep 2003 12:14 am, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> In general KMail reacts allergic to other applications messing around
> with KMail's folders. At worst you risk loosing all messages in a
> folder.

If the messages are already archived what's the loss? :-)) As long as KMail 
isn't running when MHonArc reads the mail I can't see a problem - MHonArc is 
only reading the files, it doesn't change any files unless the configuration 
is changed. I just run MHonArc when I'm preparing for a network backup - I 
can't run KMail during that process anyway. MHonArc does no more than mkisofs 
- it reads the directory and copies the files. MHonArc takes less than a 
minute to archive a month's email from three mailing lists (>1,000 messages) 
- mkisofs takes close to 10 to do the backup and cdrecord 2 to write to CD. 
If I can't leave the LAN alone for 14 minutes in a month there will be 
something very wrong!

Plus it means that I can archive my mail regularly and let KMail delete it on 
expiry or manually once I've verified the backup CD. (Incidentally, the 
single key shortcuts are very useful for that, despite the understandable 
protests - I'd like to re-enable them in the config if/when they are 
removed.)

> Furthermore CP probably doesn't want to give up the possibility to read
> and search the archive folders with KMail. Why use two frontends (one
> for current mail and one for archived mail) to access your mail?

Personally I need to correlate all email with HTML/PHP/Perl pages/scripts 
in-progress anyway because the archive relates to my web design work, so it 
suits me fine. I wouldn't say that MHonArc is a frontend - it's a backend 
script that could even run via cron. The front end is the HTML browser - 
there can't be much wrong with KHTML as a second method of access!

It is incredibly inefficient to have to read all the contents of the folder 
just to view the folder list as in KMail. Much better to have a separate HTML 
archive with a single threaded index HTML page that can be browsed and then 
load each individual HTML page as and when needed.

> At least I haven't yet seen a HTML frontend for a mail archive which is
> comparable to a mail client. Usually searching sucks, navigation in

I truly believe that MHonArc is far superior to any email client search - 
that's from continuous use of both methods over a long period. (Otherwise I 
wouldn't have recommended a separate solution.)

I write the search scripts myself - I use MHonArc because it's implemented on 
one of the sites I run as webmaster. I use Perl to write the scripts, the 
results include an abstract of the actual email contents (not the first part 
of the page) and there are the usual Boolean and case sensitive/insensitive 
pattern matching. Even without customised scripts, grep can do anything KMail 
can do - neither offer any real help constructing the regular expression so 
there's no advantage from the GUI in that respect.

Take a look at http://www.dclug.org.uk/ for a real-life example of MHonArc in 
action - try that search script too. My local one can include regular 
expression pattern matching but that's not easy to implement securely on a 
www server. There's a threaded and date-order index list for each individual 
archive going back to 1999.

> threads sucks, attachment handling sucks.

Threads I find are FAR better in MHonArc than KMail. MHonArc copes v.v.well 
with mailing list threads - especially when someone replies to an existing 
thread using a new message, losing the reference list. KMail orphans the 
offending message at the top of the list - MHonArc uses pattern matching to 
find the best match. It also copes much more effectively with people who have 
their PC clock set to last year etc. After comparing KMail and MHonArc on a 
daily basis for a personal threaded archive spanning the last 3 years (must 
be >20,000 messages in total by now), MHonArc wins hands down.

I haven't done a lot with attachments, MHonArc can file them separately and 
include a link in the final HTML but as most of the mail to be archived is 
mailing list stuff, the only attachments I get are signatures. MHonArc does 
cope admirably with JPG and other image format attachments via the same HTML 
link to a separate file mechanism.

> Regards,
> Ingo

If you haven't seen a frontend to compare with KMail, take a look at a backend 
that beats it, fair and square.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.codehelp.co.uk
http://www.dclug.org.uk

http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3

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