Re: IMAP server [was: Q: V2 format]

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Fri, 2018-09-28 at 23:01 +0200, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> 
> I have looked at gnus and there is support in there for performing
> searches via the old gmane web interface.  Public inbox already provides
> an attribute that tells you what the web server is.  So all it will
> really take is someone with a little time to wire up the search
> interface.

That's ... interesting, but of course completely out-of-band. I'm not
sure it should or could be advocated that every email client actually
implement that :-)

But if you think broader than that, you don't even necessarily need a
web server to run p-i.

> Beyond that if you have the archives local (and that is easy) it is
> quite possible to just git grep through them and find things of
> interest.

That also doesn't use the index, not sure how that's any better?

> I should verify this but I don't think IMAP has a good version of the
> NNTP overview database.  Which seems to make IMAP quite a bit slower for
> reading news.  Certainly gnus+public-inbox locally is running quite a
> bit faster than my old gnus+cyrus-imap configuration.

IMAP servers typically should do header/MIME parsing, so you should be
able to query such a thing - but not as easily as XOVER, I suppose.

However, I think FETCH could be made to return the data similar to
XOVER, though it may not be backed by a pre-created database file, and
it depends on what the client does to show the overview in the first
place.

> I tried to read through the IMAP search specification to see how it
> compares with what public-inbox makes available and I did not get
> particularly far.   It was not easy to match up the various search
> capabilities.  The biggest issue is that IMAP tends to not talk
> about message-ids.  Where that is fundamentally one of the most
> important fields to index if you are dealing with threaded mail.

You can search for arbitrary headers in search by using

HEADER <field-name> <string>

where the string is "contains", so you can use it for both Message-Id
and References headers.

> So long story short while I am not opposed to a read-only IMAP
> configuration I think NNTP has much to recommend it.  I do think we need
> little things like SSL support for NNTP.  Just to prevent inappropriate
> access to traffic in flight.

Sure. I'm not saying NNTP is bad, just saying that the choice of clients
is rather limited. Also, posting isn't supported over NNTP, so if I had
it all in my email client I could read in the public-inbox archive, and
respond via normal email.

> It won't be for a while yet but I have some scripts I need to push at
> least to the public-inbox scripts directory that simplify the process
> taking a single email address subscribing to email and sorting it out
> into different public-inbox git archives.  Currently I have every
> mailling list I am subscribed to pushed into public-inbox.

:-)

johannes