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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: Sieve support in KMail
From:       Heiko Hund <heiko () ist ! eigentlich ! net>
Date:       2005-06-06 19:11:44
Message-ID: 200506062111.44963.heiko () ist ! eigentlich ! net
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Hi,

I was also planning on some development for sieve support in kmail at some 
point in time soon. Good to hear that someone else is interested. I'd like 
to join in with the development if possible. However, don't expect too 
much, since it has been years since I helped hacking POP-Filters. I already 
have some wise comments to your post, though. =)

On Sunday 05 June 2005 13:06, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> - Sieve only supports a subset of what KMail can do with filters. The
> first filter that is not supported serverside will break the filterchain,
> and all subsequent filters are handled clientside. GUI-wise this is
> implemented by prefixing all filters with an icon that can warn the user
> when something is wrong and detailed information when the user clicks the
> filter in question. 

Do you really want to go there? I think it will be hard to develop and even 
harder to understand for the user. I understood the idea that filters are 
transparent to the user, that she doesn't need to care where the filters 
are stored, but somehow get a itch from the idea. After all sieve filters 
should not be confused with local filters. Mixing them together in one 
dialog will IMHO cause a lot of confusion. What are your feelings about a 
separate dialog for the sieve stuff (just like we did it with pop-filters 
back then)?

> - Any mail filters that are created in KMail and can also be handled by
> Sieve are uploaded to the server automatically. The 'server supports
> sieve' checkbox controls the use of Sieve. Filters are also created
> clientside, to cover the case of multiple accounts of which only a subset
> supports Sieve. 

See... I'm confused already! =)

> - Ideally the uploaded filters are optionally stored in a format
> compatible with other clients. However, some clients use really strange
> syntax to store Sieve scripts. (E.g. Squirrelmail's Avelsieve doesn't have
> a real Sieve parser, but stores the filters in its own format in a comment
> field. Changing the Sieve filter without updating the comment breaks the
> plugin.) Therefore, it's something I would like to have, but might not be
> able to achieve. Given the Sieve support of other mail clients out there
> we can get away with this at the current point in time.

Good thinking! I haven't thought of other clients yet. Concerning avelsieve: 
maybe we (or anyone) should fix avelsieve instead of including dirty hacks 
into kmail. Are all the other client you know capable of parsing sieve 
scripts?

> - The Sieve filters will only support what KMail already supports as
> filter criteria. Sieve has quite a number of extensions, and some of them
> are not at all supported by KMail. The ability to refuse mail for example
> can technically be implemented reliably in Sieve (depending on the SMTP
> server implementation) and as such we'd need to reintroduce the Bounce
> action again. For KDE 4.0 I don't plan to support all those. If someone
> gets around to do it, cool, but it's not an official goal of mine.

Having an own dialog, we could implement the complete sieve stuff without 
thinking about compatibility with local filters. 

> - Ideally any changes done on the server from another client are merged
> back into KMail. This has a couple of technical challenges though, notably
> filters that use Sieve syntax that we don't support yet. I'm not sure what
> to do with this. There are quite some options here, and I'm still far away
> from this problem to really worry about it already.

Sieve filters are server-based and I think that is also where they should be 
stored. Mixing them up logically and treating them as if they were local is 
IMHO a bad idea and can easily lead to confusion (and worse: bug reports) 
=)

Please let me know what you think.

Regards
Heiko
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