Re: A little help from my friends

[Nathan Williams <nwilliams@primeon.com>]

michel@digicool.com writes:

> There are several IMAP mailboxes I'd like to get to that are several
> levels deep, for example:
> 
> Public Folders/Mailing Lists/Zope Folder

> And here is the output of 'gnus-groups-enter-server-mode' when I
> select nnimap:gandalf:
> 
[list of mailboxes with everything under Public Folders suspiciously
 missing deleted]
> 
> The thing is, I thought that ("" . "*") would list all my boxes,
> including everything in 'Public Folders', but that doesn't even show
> up, just my 'Personal' mailboxes.

        I have the same problem. From reading back in the list
archives, it seems that nnimap punts mailboxes with spaces in the
name, because gnus can't cope with spaces either. Since the whole
reason that my company forced us all onto the Exchange system from a
pop-based system was to have these shared folders, this is a real
problem for me. I suspect it will be for others too, since the "Public
Folders" shared area seems to be part of an out-of-the-box Exchange
Server configuration.

        I've started digging into the code to try and figure out where
it's punting them so that I can implement some kind of invertable
mapping between imap mailbox names and gnus group names, just to get
something working. Unfortunately, my elisp is rather rusty.

        One general solution would be to apply the IMAP-modified UTF-7
encoding to mailbox name characters that gnus can't cope with (what
else besides space? I don't know). That scheme would translate your
folder name above:

Public Folders/Mailing Lists/Zope Folder
to:
Public&IA==-Folders/Mailing&IA==-Lists/Zope&IA==-Folder

(I think I've gotten that encoding right)

        This is insanely ugly. My feeling is that the dash character
is better suited to being a non-space separator, both visually and in
the minds of emacs users. Also, at least in the mailboxes I'm dealing
with so far, spaces are more common than dashes, so optimizing the
mapping for visual clarity of names with spaces makes sense. The
mapping I propose translates ' ' to '-' and '-' to '-=-', which is
invertable, visually similar to the original, and does not require
shifted characters (an advantage for those of us who are prone to RSI
problems). This would map:

Public Folders/Mailing Lists/Zope Folder
to:
Public-Folders/Mailing-Lists/Zope-Folder

        Comments?

        - Nathan