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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: Bug#24532: integration of kmail with knode
From:       Alan Chandler <alan () chandlerfamily ! org ! uk>
Date:       2001-04-22 14:09:31
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On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 14:12:45 +0200, you wrote:

>On Sunday 22 April 2001 07:03, vkhaitan@iitk.ac.in wrote:
>
>> Why not kmail is integrated with knode, as other email clients like
>> outlook express, netscape has done.
>
>I don't see any integration of mail/news in Netscape besides the fact that 
>they just put everything in one binary. The only thing you get this way is 
>bloat.

Because its useful.  I too have been thinking about this - I am
currently using Agent (not the free version, but the one that
integrates news and mail) on top of Wine which does this.  There are
some things in news readers which would also go very nicely with a
mail package used primarily (as in my case) for mailing list traffic
rather than individiual mails.  Agent has some disadvantages (non
hierarchical folders and lack of automatic old mail purge) which
because its not open source I can't do anything about.  

I have been thinking of switching over the kmail, and I have been
trying to track the CVS source so that I could learn what it does and
then make the changes. [As an aside I am totally failing to do this -
I have a debian woody system and have been struggling with libraries
installed via .debs and those in the source.  (Debian File Hierarchy
Stardards are at orthoganal branch to what qt and kde use as their
standards and I am not sure how to specify ./configure parameters to
match it). Yesterday as an act of despair, I planned to build
everything from qt upwards from source - and remove all the debian
stuff related to this.  I finally got through to the
www.kde.org/cvsup.html page for instructions (it timed out on me most
of yesterday) and did a cvsup from qt-copy and up - only to find that
doing the first make on the qt directory the make broke throwing up
yacc errors in moc.y :-( .  Now I don't know what to do!]

The way I run Agent, is that I have filter rules which pulls each
mailing list into a separate folder.  The folders then look like
subscribed newsgroups.  Then a single press of the space bar scrolls
down the first unread message a page at a time, and then onto the next
unread message in the same group, and eventually onto a new group.
Mail and News are treated identically, so I just move on from one to
the other.  [I note with interest the patch from Stephan Kulow which
appears to put this important facility into Kmail - unfortunately
because of the problems above I haven't tried it yet - actually I did
try the first version of the patch, but it didn't cross folder
boundaries as Stephan later confirmed]

The important facility that Agent is missing and which I wanted to see
if I could add to kmail was the facility to purge read messages after
a couple of weeks like it is possible to do on the newsgroups (on a
folder specific basis only of course, and with the ability to put a
specific message lock to prevent that particular message being purged)
- which when you get a couple of hundred messages a day from all the
mailing lists is a necessary admininistrative need. [Again I have been
following the discussion on filtering - wondering if this is already
being worked on]

Ideally I would like something like the way the new IMAP interface has
been added, in that you create a new account which instead of POP3 or
IMAP is NNTP.  Of course with NNTP it has to act as a cross between
IMAP (in which there are multiple folders) and POP3 - in that they get
sucked into your local machine.

[It is possible to for me to get round this by using Mailman to create
local mailing lists that are gated to news, since the newsgroups that
I subscribe to stays pretty static - but frankly this is a bit of a
kludge]

I have never tried to use Netscape - but I have seen the way that
Outlook express pretends to integrate the news and mail and doesn't -
I get the impression that Netscape takes a similar approach.  This is
not what is needed and WOULD lead to a bloated package.

What I would like to see is a recognition that from a user perception
news and mailing lists are pretty well the same concept and that when
the majority of mail is of this form then there are strong arguments
for bringing the software to manage these two activities into a single
application.

 
Alan

alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk
http://www.chandler.u-net.com
http://www.chandler.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
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