Re: nnimap article editing revisited

[Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se>]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> > No, this is impossible -- you simply can't edit articles with IMAP.
> 
> Except maybe through the trick you thought about: deleting the old
> article and inserting a new article with a new UID.

Yup. Hm. One need to remember a mapping from "old uid" -> "new uid"
while the summary buffer is open, and one has to change the article
number in the newsrc info stuff in Gnus. And perhaps something more.

It's probably possible, but it would be very ugly and would make
nnimap depend on and use lots of internal stuff in Gnus. I'd rather
not do that.

> This is an ugly hack, but article editing is a very useful back door
> for fixing much of the brokenness of today's MUAs.  
> 
> Everything from retreading (which could maybe be done in another
> way...?) to fixing broken MIME headers or turning an erronously
> forwarded (done by elm) MIME message into a readable message where I
> could extract the attachments.

IMHO Gnus should not modify the mail to achieve this -- "fixing"
articles should be at the display level.  Also, if we do this stuff at
the display level at will be more general, ie it would work with nntp,
nnmh etc.

-s