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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    KMail Concepts: Message Handling
From:       Stefan Taferner <taferner () salzburg ! co ! at>
Date:       2000-03-27 12:26:12
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Hi everybody,

Here I would like to discuss concepts about how messages should be
handled ideally.

I collect some thoughts I have. Comments welcome.

As Qt supports unicode we should support unicode too.

Shall kmail convert incoming messages to unicode representation
or is it more important to have the message exactly in the original format?

This is a crucial question. Mimelib ensures that the message is not
changed if possible at all, but their mechanism cannot be used as
QString works different. 

We end up IMO with three possibilities:

a) Convert the whole message to objects upon read and only work
  with objects. Very elegant and easy to use, but the original (exact)
  message is lost.

b) Convert only the message header (for filtering and message lists), and
  convert the body parts on demand. A bit more difficult to use, and might
  need multiple parsing of body parts.

c) Convert even the header on demand only.

The advantage of a) would be that one does not have to bother with
encodings. When the message is read it is converted to unicode, and
when it is stored somewhere it is written in a standard format. Pretty
easy to use.

What do you think?

Kind regards,
Stefan

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