Re: one solution to replacing articles

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

John Prevost <prevost@maya.com> writes:

> Not necessarily too kludgy, but could be slow in some circumstances.
> The servers I know of either cache a subset of the headers for fast
> searching, or do no caching at all.  That could mean that searching
> for the appropriate header would be far too slow.

Probably, yes. But the only operation that would be slow would be
fetching a replaced articles, perhaps thats the price you pay for
editing capabilities. All unmodified articles don't have the
`gnus-replaced' flag so no searching is done for them.

> The specific reason that comes to mind is the not insignificant number
> of read-only mailboxes I have on my server for mailing list archives
> and the like.  Since these are shared mailboxes, I don't even have the
> ability (on Cyrus, anyway) to add non-standard flags to messages.

Nnimap can't do anything about this. Replacing a article requires
write access, if you don't have that you're out of luck.

> If this could be done, it might even be possible to push it at the
> IETF as a propsed extension.

Perhaps we can update the ANNOTATE¹ extension? It looks useful after a
quick read? Gnus could store the annotation locally if the backend
doesn't support annotations or can't use them for some reason (like on
your read-only folders).

1, http://www.imap.org/docs/annotate.html